WOODROW WILSON 

AN INTERPRETATION 



A. MAURICE LOW 




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GoiJ)TightN'*. 



CQFUUGHT OEPOStn 



WOODROW WILSON 

AN INTERPRETATION 




/■/loto t>i/ VlinettlnsI, from fenlral .Vnr.s Sirrln . \ Y. 
WOOD ROW WI l.SON 



WOODROW WILSON 



AN INTERPRETATION 



BY 

A. MAURICE LOW, M.A. 

AUTHOR OF 

" IHE AMERICAN PEOPLE : A STUDY IN 

NATIONAL PSTCHOLOGT," ETC. 



(SJ ONREF^k TI 




dQV^JVAD•Q3S 



BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COIVIPANY 

1918 






Copyright, 1918, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 

All rights reserved 



DEC 12 I5i8 



Set up ami clcctrotypcd by J. S. Cusliing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
Prcsswork by S. J. Parkbill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



©n A f) 8 879 



Co 
K. G. 

MY SEVEREST AND MOST LENIENT 
CRITIC 



PREFACE 

Of the dead it is easier to write than of the living. 
Of the dead, it is true, we speak with charity, our 
judgment is tempered even when it is critical, but the 
historian is able to deal fairly and dispassionately with 
the men who have passed ; with approximate accuracy 
he can measure not only their intentions but appraise 
their achievements ; the causes of failure are not diffi- 
cult to determine. Spread before him are motives, 
policies, ambitions, the sum of all that make men great 
or ignoble, and historical values are determined by 
results. The perspective of history is the past. 

The contemporary writer is denied these advantages. 
He is too near the events of which he writes. Often 
he is an actor, although his is a very minor role, in the 
unfolding drama. He is the scene shifter to whom the 
royal jewels are paste, but to the audience, looking at 
the stage through the sorcery of softened lights and 
the benevolence of distance, they are real. He is per- 
plexed in his attempt to render judgment, to reconcile 
conflicting qualities, to be the impartial recorder; 
resisting the temptation to allow his feelings to accord 
undue praise or to indulge in unwarranted severity. 

The contemporary writer is brought in contact not 



viii PREFACE 

with historical personages but with men, with men on 
whom the ghimour of history has not yet fallen, who 
have not yet made history and passed into the keeping 
of the Immortals but are history in the making. And 
history invests its characters with a quality of its own. 
It makes them either very great or very small, it places 
them on a pedestal for all ages to do them reverence, 
or degrades them to earn the contempt of posterity 
— for history is no gentle muse but is always extreme ; 
but whatever the recorded verdict, to us of a later day 
they have ceased to be men and have become legendary 
figures. Our contemporaries are men, men like our- 
selves, whom daily we judge, criticize, condemn or ap- 
prove to meet our passing mood. 

I have made no attempt to write either history or a 
biography of Woodrow Wilson. That time has not 
yet come. The history of the Administration of Presi- 
dent Wilson it would be inadvisable to write now, — 
for reasons so obvious they need no enlargement, — 
nor would it be possible unless the writer were in pos- 
session of letters, diaries, documents and state papers 
that are not likely to gratify this generation. Some 
of these, a few, are even now available, but discretion 
imposes silence. For history we must wait until time 
permits disclosures that now would be inopportune. 
What I have endeavored to do is to interpret the char- 
acter and motives of Mr. Wilson as revealed by his 
speeches, writings and statesmanship, letting the reader 
draw his conclusions from the evidence presented. 



PREFACE ix 

It has seemed to mo that it Is work that ought to 
be done, not only because the man who to-day occu- 
pies the hirgest phice in the world's thought is almost 
as little understood by his own people as he is by the 
peoples of other countries and still remains an enigma, 
but a certain interest may attach to the work of a con- 
temporary foreign observer who, while having the 
benefit of long residence in the United States, and an 
intimate knowledge of its people and politics, may 
justly claim to take a detached point of view and to be 
uninfluenced by personal or political considerations. 
It is in that spirit of detachment, as if I were dealing 
with the past and not the present, I have endeavored 
to write ; and while, I repeat, this is not history, I 
have not been unmindful of the responsibility of the 
historian. 

In his preface to "Division and Reunion" Mr. Wil- 
son wrote: *'I cannot claim to have judged rightly 
in all cases as between parties. I can claim, however, 
impartiality of judgment ; for impartiality is a matter 
of the heart, and I know with what disposition I have 
written." That sentiment I make my own. I cannot 
hope that in all my judgments I have been correct, 
that I have perhaps in all cases done justice, but I can 
claim to have written with sincerity and a purpose, 
striving to tell the truth as it is given to me to see it. 

Washington, October, 1918. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Preface vii 

I The Beginning of Reform 1 

n Agitation and Unkest 13 

III The Man 30 

rV The Enigma 59 

V A Pledge to Humanity 74 

\T The First Year of Leadership .... 87 
\TI America at the Outbreak of War . . .111 

"Vlll "Too Proud to Fight" 152 

IX The Evangeust 174! 

X America in the War 212 

XI The War President 241 

Xn History and the Verdict 277 



WOODROW WILSON 

AN INTERPRETATION 

CHAPTER I 

The Beginning of Reform 
1 

When Woodrow Wilson came to the "WTiite House 
on the fourth of March, 1913, the Democratic party 
returned to power after sixteen years in opposition. 
Mr. Wilson's Democratic predecessor, Mr. Cleve- 
land, left as a legacy to his successor war or peace 
with Spain. That war, fought in the year following 
Mr. McKinley's inauguration, had far-reaching conse- 
quences for the United States : for the first time since 
it became a nation the United States was the master 
of oversea dependencies and the ruler of subject races ; 
it became an Asiatic power and its frontier was flung 
seven thousand miles across the Pacific. In the year 
following peace the American people were to be wit- 
ness to another and more costly war when the Boers 
challenged the power of England ; and five years later 
the American people, in common with the rest of the 
world, were witness to a still mightier struggle when 

1 



2 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Japan took up arms against Russia to decide the 
mastery of the Far East. 

Yet those three wars, important in their poHtical 
effects to the nations involved, produced Httle 
impression upon American national consciousness. 
The thought of America had turned from war to peace, 
the great problems that men were grappling with were 
not military conquest but social reform. A new spirit 
had entered into men. They were reaching out for 
something better than they had, they were striving to 
remove the inequality and injustice of an artificially 
stimulated social system. This spirit was moving men 
in all parts of the world, but nowhere perhaps was its 
force so insistent as in the United States. Humanity 
was groping and toiling, not sure what it was seeking, 
and yet quite sure what it sought was to be found ; not 
always wise in its experiments, and yet with faith 
struggling. 

Reform was in the air. The social order was chang- 
ing ; the change had almost come. Men were looking 
at life with new vision. In the three great Democracies 
of the world, in England, France and the United 
States, social experimentation was being tried on a 
vast scale. Woman suffrage, prohibition, old-age 
pensions, State insurance, the curbing of the power of 
monopoly and the arrogance of wealth, these were 
symptoms of a mental and spiritual rebirth. It was a 
time of excessive luxury, of great wealth, of intense 
selfishness ; In some respects materialism had a deeper 



THE BEGINNING OF REFORM 3 

hold tlian ever before in the world's history ; and yet 
even those deepest sunk in their materialism, who 
defended the existing order and resented change, dimly 
saw that change was inevitable, vaguely felt that justice 
cried for reform, but hoped only it might be postponed 
so that tlieir comfort would not be disturbed. To the 
great mass, not alone the downtrodden and the poor 
and the illiterate, the day of their deliverance was 
near. 



It was fitting these aspirations should be symbolized 
in the person of the newly elected President of the 
United States. To Mr. Wilson Democracy was less 
a political belief than an immanent conviction, and 
he had given repeated proof of his faith. Imbued in 
the tenets of his political forefathers, seeing in tlieir 
code a moral guidance which was also the rule of 
statesmanship, reposing confidence in the wisdom of 
the people to govern themselves, rejecting the thought 
that they were incapable of self-government and must 
necessarily be directed by a selected class, his sympa- 
thies and his intellect made him support the cause 
of the people against privilege. 

He was no noisy champion. He offered no hostages 
to the great Demos and had no nostrums to bring uni- 
versal salvation. He had no picturesque or romantic 
past and had known no long and bitter struggle against 
adversity. As a boy he had not toiled beyond his 



4 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

strength, and as a man he had not acquired learning 
in odd moments snatched from his work. Of gentle 
birth and with an inherited love of scholarship, he 
passed through school and college to begin, as he 
believed, his chosen vocation of the law, and to 
abandon it forever two years later. It is popular 
impression that Mr. Wilson divorced himself thus 
early from his profession because it failed to provide 
him adequate support, which is generally recognized 
as valid ground for divorce, but incompatibility of 
temperament was the real reason for the speedy 
dissolution of the incongruous union. Mr. Wilson, 
who began the practice of his profession in Atlanta, 
was quickly disillusioned when he discovered the 
depth and slime of the gulf that separated the 
philosophy of law from its practice. To an imagina- 
tive but philosophically matured youth who absorbed 
the theory of law from textbooks in the seclusion of 
college or heard the science of jurisprudence ex- 
pounded in the classroom, its precision and logical 
foundation must have charmed a mind that clarified 
thought and was always strongly responsive to a sense 
of justice; but the law in its practical application 
came as a shock. 

Atlanta at that time was no worse, and certainly no 
better, than other Southern cities, and its public and 
professional morality was the standard of its day. At 
the Atlanta bar there were men of high professional 
standing whose code was as rigid and narrow as the 



THE BEGINNING OF REFORM 5 

sternest critic could demand, but lliere were also a 
goodly proportion of "ambulance chasers", tricksters 
and dishonest advocates who promoted litigation in 
the hope of gaining fees irrespective of the merits of 
the cause. The atmosphere disgusted Mr. Wilson. 
He found himself brought in competition with men of 
dubious morals ; the competition was not to his 
liking, nor were his surroundings congenial. De- 
liberately he turned his back on them, recognizing at 
that early age, and he was only twenty-five, that he 
could better serve himself and society by writing and 
teaching the philosophy of the law than by helping 
its contamination. This was the explanation he made 
to his friend, Albert Shaw (the present editor of the 
Review of Reviews), when he came to Baltimore to take 
a postgraduate course at Johns Hopkins. "There 
is Blank," mentioning the name of a well-known 
practitioner who was rapidly becoming rich, he said 
to young Shaw, who relates the incident, "who has 
made a success by taking personal injury cases against 
the railways and other corporations and is none too 
scrupulous about the character and testimony of his 
witnesses, and perhaps in time I may be equally 
successful." But that was not the success he craved 
or the measure of his ambition. That he had the 
courage to renounce a profession whose methods were 
to him distasteful and had the strength of will to take 
up a new profession for which he felt himself better 
fitted and one making a stronger appeal to him, 



6 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

shows not only the strength of character and in- 
flexibiHty of will that was later to puzzle political 
supporters and political opponents, but also that the 
early bent of his thoughts was now unalterably fixed. 

In 1879, then a student at Princeton, he had written 
for the International Review an essay entitled "Cabinet 
Government in the United States", which six years 
later appeared in book form as "Congressional Govern- 
ment", and is the most important of Mr. Wilson's 
works. "Congressional Government" is an amplifi- 
cation of the International Review essay ; the under- 
lying thought and the philosophic treatment remain 
unchanged. It is an extraordinary piece of work to 
have been done by a youth of twenty-three, in its 
way as rare an example of precociousness, maturity of 
judgment and grasp of his subject as Byron's "Childe 
Harold." 

In those two years from 1883 to 1885, when he was 
doing graduate work at Johns Hopkins in political 
economy and history, he was preparing for the part 
he intended to play. Whether that included politics 
it is impossible to say, for whatever dreams beguiled 
him or ambitions spurred his fancy he shared his con- 
fidence with no one so far as I have been able to learn ; 
but it is certain he was determined not only to in- 
fluence thought by his pen but also to appeal to the 
emotion of intellect through speech. In Baltimore he 
was a close and persistent student, devoting himself 
not only to political economy and history but also to a 



THE BEGINNING OF REFORM 7 

study of tlio best masters of Eiifrlish forensic oratory. 
He read with critical discrimination and a purpose 
now quite evident the parHamentary speeches and the 
pubHc addresses of Burke and Chatliam and Grattan 
and other men equally well known, dissecting them, 
appraising tliem, testing them, catching their tricks 
of style and tearing from their stilled hearts the secret 
that can never still the voice of the really great orator. 
He wanted to be their compeer, and he was learning 
in their school. 

Shaw was one of the few men with whom Mr. 
Wilson was on terms of intimacy at that time. Mr. 
Wilson was neither a recluse nor unsociable; he was 
a man with a serious purpose, although with always 
a sense of dry humor, as every man of imagination 
must have, but he was too deeply engrossed in study 
to have either the time or inclination for frivolity. 
As he wrote "Congressional Government" he gave 
his manuscript to Shaw to read, not to invite criticism, 
because even then Mr. Wilson did not invite criticism 
any more than now he welcomes opposition ; perhaps 
simply for his approval. The two young men were 
engaged on work that had something in common. 
WTiile Mr. Wilson was studying history and political 
economy and parliamentary debate, Shaw was study- 
ing the development of municipal government in 
Europe and America. And Shaw recalls what is 
eminently characteristic of ]\Ir. Wilson and shows how 
early the iron mold of his character was formed. 



8 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Baltimore is only forty miles from Washington, and 
in Washington the Congressional Government of 
which the Johns Hopkins student was writing was 
functioning, but Mr. Wilson, Doctor Shaw believes, 
seldom if ever went to Washington during those two 
years. Almost any other man, it is safe to say, would 
have wanted to see the machine at work, would have 
welcomed the opportunity to talk with the engineers, 
would have gladly absorbed the atmosphere so as to 
create a background. Mr. Bryce came to America 
to confirm by observation theoretical judgments. 
Mr. Wilson, in the cold serenity of detachment, 
kept aloof, his thoughts becoming crystal in the 
alembic of his mind. The marvel is that the youth 
of twenty-three, who knew nothing of Washington, 
who had no practical knowledge of government or 
the methods of the legislature, and the young man 
six years later who was so sure of his conclusions that 
he saw no necessity to revise them, should have pro- 
duced the best and most authoritative work on the 
subject. Genius has been likened to the spider wlio 
draws from itself the filaments of its web ; and genius 
creates without extraneous assistance, drawing on its 
own stored-up endowment. "Congressional Govern- 
ment" is almost the touch of genius. 

3 

Leaving Johns Hopkins in 1885 to accept the chair 
of history and political economy in Bryn Mawr 



THE BEGINNING OF REFORM 9 

College, Pennsylvania, an institution for llie liigluT 
education of women, Mr. Wilson's career falls 
naturally into three grand divisions, and it is a career 
unparalleled in America or England, or any other 
democratic country, ancient or modern : 1. the 
teacher and secular preacher ; 2. the politician ; 3. 
the President. For twenty -five years, from 1885 to 
1910, when he was elected Governor of New Jersey, 
his entire time was given to pedagogical work, to 
writing and to lecturing. He took no active part in 
politics, and whatever influence he exercised on the 
political thought of his day was indirect and exercised 
through his books and addresses on the philosophic 
meaning of history read by the light of modern prob- 
lems of government and politics. 

His audience was never in any sense popular. He 
had no gift of phrase or thought to arrest for an in- 
stant the scurrying feet of the jostling crowd. He was 
deficient in the showman's arts and ignorant of the 
trick of self advertisement. There have been college 
professors who have attained the fleeting honor of 
shrieking headlines on the front page and gained the 
proud distinction of the editorial column by, at "the 
psychological moment" so beloved of editors hunger- 
ing for a sensation, denouncing the institution of 
marriage or advocating too much marriage, or some- 
thing else equally as irregular. In the quarter of a 
century that he taught and spoke Mr. Wilson escaped 
this homage. 



10 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

His appeal had always been to the intellectuals, to 
those whom Americans, with their gift for crystallizing 
a sentence in a word or two, know as "highbrows." 
He was one of the cognoscenti, and it was the cogno- 
scenti he sought as his audience. He was over the 
heads of the masses, and the masses, had they read or 
heard him, would have turned away weary and with- 
out comprehension of his message, which they would 
have dismissed succinctly as "highbrow stuff", and 
therefore outside of their class. His addresses were 
delivered before selected audiences, lawyers, teachers, 
civic reformers, which precluded the general public 
from hearing him, even if they had the inclination; 
and his speeches were not of a character to make 
them popular reading and therefore to justify the press 
in giving them extended space. He wrote for maga- 
zines and reviews that were exotic so far as the general 
public was concerned, and whose limited circulation 
was confined to the educated. To the multitude his 
books were recondite, admirable although they are in 
style, lucidity and the crystal clearness of his thought. 
His one attempt at popularity, "A History of the 
American People", his friends regret. Mr. Wilson 
can write nothing without giving it distinction, and in 
the five volumes may be found flashes of his style 
and shrewd analysis that redeem the work from dull- 
ness, but it is not quite bad enough to be really 
"popular" and widely read, and it is not quite good 
enough to be the historian's history. 



THE BEGINNING OF REFORM 11 

Mr. Wilson's position and standing in tlie educa- 
tional world brought to him an ever-widening circle 
of acquaintances, and personally or by reputation 
he was constantly becoming better known, but this 
knowledge was confined to a class in the aggregate 
numerically large, but actually only a minor fraction 
of the whole. His name carried weight with educators, 
literati, students of the science of government, 
graduates of schools and colleges, but to the working- 
man, the great middle class, perhaps a majority of 
business men and the rank and file of the political 
world, it meant nothing. Mr. Wilson's obscurity — 
and the use of the word is permissible — came from 
his having connected himself with no great popular 
movement, with leading no clamorous demand for 
sudden reform, with having neither sought nor held 
political oflSce. Unlike as they may be in many 
things, in one thing the three great Democracies of 
America, England and France have the same common 
trait. ]Men may achieve fame through success at 
the bar, by literature, in discovery or invention or 
by accumulating a huge fortune, but it is as true in 
America as it is in England and France that to become 
known, to become what Bagehot calls "not only 
household words, but household ideas", a man must 
be a political leader, and his fellow men, again to 
borrow a thought from Bagehot, must have a con- 
ception, not, perhaps, in all respects a true, but a 
most vivid conception of what he is like. In a word, 



12 WOODROW ^VILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

you cannot have a leader unless you are able to 
visualize him ; he must symbolize not merely an idea 
but a personality ; he cannot remain, so Bagehot 
believed, an unknown quantity. In this sense Mr. 
Wilson, up to the time of his election as Governor 
of New Jersey, was obscure. In this sense he had 
none of the requirements believed necessary for 
leadership. In this sense, to the majority of his 
countrymen, he was an unknown quantity. Not 
only had they no vivid conception of him, but all that 
their imagination could picture was blurred, the in- 
distinct outlines of a name without substance. 

In other countries, at long intervals under the stress 
of a great popular movement or the fear of national 
disaster, men hitherto obscure, by their fiery elo- 
quence, have sprung into prominence and seized 
power; and the politician "powerful in faction and 
debate" may count with reasonable certainty on 
success. Here there was nothing of the kind. No 
great emergency threatened, the people were not 
stirred by fear, their future was not in peril. From 
the presidency of Princeton University Mr. Wilson 
passed to the Governor's chair.. He was then fifty- 
four years old, and he was holding his first political 
oflSce. It is not exaggeration to say that no man was 
ever elected to high office under similar circumstances, 
and no man was so much of an unknown quantity 
to the great body of the electorate as Woodrow Wilson 
when he took the oath of service to the people. 



CHAPTER II 

Agitation and Unrest 
1 

For the purposes of this interpretation it is unneces- 
sary to follow the campaign that led to Mr. Wilson's 
election as Governor of New Jersey, but it is requisite 
to ascertain the causes that made possible the election 
of a man who, in the sense that has already been 
noted, was obscure and so little identified in the pub- 
lic mind with practical politics. Mr. Wilson was a 
fitting candidate because he peculiarly typified the 
new day. 

It is to the advantage of a man seeking political 
office that he shall have a past, and sometimes it is 
of even greater advantage that he shall be the "un- 
known quantity" that Bagehot thought made him 
impossible; "that he should wear a clean and ir- 
reproachable insignificance", in Mr. Wilson's own 
phrase. If he belongs to the "old guard" and has 
served in various capacities, his party knows what to 
expect from him, and if his party is in the majority 
he goes through simply because party discipline com- 
pels his acceptance. An unknown man brings to 

13 



14 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

his candidacy a certain element of romance and 
mystery ; he appeals to that large and constantly 
increasing section of the electorate that distrusts the 
professional politician and fears his associations. Mr. 
Wilson disarmed opposition. Lawyers, doctors, men 
of business, clergymen even, when reform was in the 
air and the ultra-respectable vote had to be catered 
to, have been selected as candidates for Governor, 
but seldom if ever has the president of a great univer- 
sity passed from the seclusion of academic quiet to 
the turmoil of politics. If, in a sense, the men to 
whom he appealed for their suffrages knew little of 
him, on the other hand the little they knew was in 
his favor. He occupied a high and dignified position ; 
his profession had kept him aloof from the sordidness 
that the public associates with the sharp practices 
of the lawyer or the tricky morality of the man of 
business ; much as the public may pretend a contempt 
for the unpractical scholar, nevertheless it has a 
respect for learning. And in a day of great wealth, 
when there was a deep undercurrent of resentment 
against great wealth and, in the popular belief, its 
unlicensed power, it did not disparage Mr. Wilson 
that he was a poor man and a toiler. 

Even more than this, perhaps, he was the voice of 
the new spirit, as the electors were soon to know, as 
he went up and down the State addressing political 
meetings, and they were brought under the influence 
of his incomparable oratory and learned the principles 



AGITATION AND UNREST 15 

he had so long espoused and the reforms he promised 
them. 

They had heard miicli of reform and were weary of 
the mirage of false hopes, and yet no matter how 
often they were disappointed their faith remained un- 
shaken and hope never deserted them. Mr. Cleve- 
land, the first Democratic President since the Civil 
War, had quickened public conscience when, as was 
said, "he put humanity into the tariff" and brought 
to the Presidency a new conception of public duty. 
Although many great achievements stood to their 
credit and they placed on the statute books much 
memorable legislation, so long had the Republican 
party been in power authority made them arrogant, 
abuse fattened on their legislation and a privileged 
class was becoming securely intrenched ; but the 
Republicans were saved by the intellectual poverty of 
their opponents and the incapacity of Democratic 
leaders. Mr. Cleveland's first election was a social 
revolution, bloodless though it was ; but it was never- 
theless a revolt of the masses against the classes ; and 
in the day before the people spoke through the ballot 
Mr. Cleveland w^ould have come into power l)acked 
by the pikes and swords of his adherents, or, like Wat 
Tyler, paid the penalty for attempting to overthrow 
the established order. 

Mr. Cleveland founded no era, but as I\Ir. Wilson 
wrote of him shortly after his death when the passion 
he aroused was still hot and justice was still denied 



IG WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

him, "he played a great part"; he forestalled what 
is now the verdict of history when he said, "no such 
great personality has appeared in our politics since 
Lincoln", and w^ith equal truth that "he has made 
policies and altered parties after the fashion of an 
earlier age in our history." Yet he founded no era, 
he broke the Republican succession but left no heir; 
what he did was shortly undone, and the Republicans 
were intrenched for sixteen years. Intrenched, yes, 
but they were always facing a foe who while not strong 
enough to carry the assault was no longer to be 
despised. 

Mr. Bryan, who consistently led his party to defeat 
but nevertheless retained its affection and admiration, 
is one of the pathetic figures of history. Well mean- 
ing, with high principles and ideals, wandering in 
an ultramontane kingdom of impossible perfection, 
strictly adhering to his own rigid code, he was given 
a great opportunity and accomplished nothing. Had 
Mr. Bryan been a man of greater flexibility, with a 
mind cast in a more generous mold, had he been able 
to escape from the dwarfing influences of his environ- 
ment and the parochial school of politics in which he 
trained, had he, in short, been able to see life whole 
and been gifted with a wider knowledge of life and a 
fuller understanding of its meaning, less intolerant 
because of his pragmatic virtue and more ready to 



AGITATION AND UNREST 17 

recognize that in all men there is a spark of virtue 
even if it is obscured by some vice, the story might 
have been differently written. He did not attain his 
great ambition, the Presidency, that thrice was to be 
his and eluded him, but that must not blind us to the 
great influence he exercised in shaping public opinion. 
He crystallized what before had been vague and in- 
determinate. He had no power of clear thinking and 
his argument was always specious, nevertheless he 
was able to put into concrete form the nebulous 
thoughts of men unable to give them coherence. It 
was his misfortune, the same ill luck that always pur- 
sued him, that he must tie the living body of justice 
to the corpse of economics. Political economy is a 
science too abstruse for the masses, who are moved 
less by reason than by prejudice and an inherited 
tradition of injustice, but Mr. Bryan, through the force 
of his oratory, his sincerity and his human appeal, 
articulated his economic skeleton, he clothed it in 
living flesh, and the people to whom he preached had 
a glimmering of a social system resting on money and 
the power of money in legislation. Defeated though 
he was, too revolutionary for his conservative times, a 
century too late or a quarter of a century too soon, he 
dropped in fertile soil the seed of unrest which he was 
to live to see bring forth fruit, but not for his enjoy- 
ment. 

Mr. McKinley, who defeated Mr. Bryan and suc- 
ceeded Mr. Cleveland, accepted the verdict as a man- 



18 WOODROW ^\^LSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

date to stamp out the radicalism to which Mr. Bryan 
had given encouragement and bring back the country 
to the safe and easy path of "conservatism" ; a policy 
that accorded with his political beliefs and affiliations. 
The work that Mr. Cleveland had done, the things 
complained of which was the protest of the six million 
men who voted for Mr. Bryan, INIr. McKinley and 
his party ignored. The Republican party had been 
returned to power to carry out — as the party be- 
lieved, and in a way had a right to believe — the 
policies that Republican Presidents and Republican 
majorities in Congress year after year had fastened 
on the country. To the politician, who reads history 
only by the light of the latest election returns, the 
future was not to be feared ; yet reform was coming, 
though few men could hear the quiet footsteps of the 
herald of its approach. 

The forces that were behind Mr. McKinley gave 
strength to the rapidly increasing discontent. Mr. 
McKinley's amiability, his blameless life, his simplicity 
of character made him respected personally, but the 
resentment against the men who shaped and carried 
out his policies, who, in the popular belief, manipu- 
lated the government for the benefit of a privileged 
class, could not be quieted. One of the great elements 
of strength of the Republicans had been the number 
of newspapers of large circulation and vigorously 
edited that supported their principles, but of recent 
years there had grown up a healthy Democratic and 



AGITATION AND UNKEST 1!) 

Independent Press that mercilessly criticized their 
opponents and kept alive the demand for reform. 
There had also come into existence a Press that called 
itself Independent, Republican or Democratic, accord- 
ing to the community in which it circulated, but 
which pandered to passion and class hatred, and 
without regard to truth or decency indiscriminately 
attacked men and measures, not because they were 
unfit or bad, but to increase their circulation and 
power. Animated by the basest and most sordid 
motives, but stealing the livery of virtue and pretend- 
ing only disinterestedness and sympathy for the 
people powerless to defend themselves, these news- 
papers made the unintelligent and ignorant believe 
their condition was intolerable and could only be 
remedied by a violent readjustment of society. 

3 

The bullet in the hand of a man half mad, half 
fanatic cut the slender cord that had long been weaken- 
ing under the strain. In the natural order of things 
the change was bound to come, but it would have come 
gradually and without shock; now the change was 
cataclysmic. Mr. McKinley's successor, young, virile, 
undisciplined, with a dramatic imagination and a 
love of show, had not been unobservant of the tend- 
ency of the times, nor had he failed to note that 
although Mr. Bryan was defeated and jNIr. McKinlcy 
elected, it was Mr. Bryan who held the passionate 



20 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

affection of the people, it was he who had stirred their 
emotions as they had not been moved since Lincoln 
made politics a moral issue. Mr. Roosevelt with 
more skill, more subtlety, more adroitness, with a 
greater command of phrase and a more vivid appeal 
to imagination, did what Mr. Bryan more stolidly 
had attempted to do and failed. Mr. Bryan whimsi- 
cally remarked that Mr. Roosevelt stole his clothes 
while he went in bathing, which was the same accusa- 
tion an English statesman had brought against his 
rival many years earlier. It was the irony of fate 
that what had been condemned in Mr. Bryan as being 
too dangerous and vicious, and rejected by the coun- 
try as subversive of the security of society, was now, 
when championed by Mr. Roosevelt, accepted not 
as destructively radical but constructively "pro- 
gressive." There was nothing extraordinary about 
this ; it is the same thing that has happened in every 
country in every age. A new idea is always dangerous 
until it is old, and it becomes old only when the world 
has advanced far enough to accept it without fear. 

Mr. Roosevelt satisfied a certain want, but he did 
not go far enough. The progressive zealot was at 
heart a Republican. The Roosevelt administration 
was still the party of McKinley, Any discussion of 
American politics and their reaction on American 
sociology must inevitably lead to the tariff. Rightly 
or wrongly, the American people are divided into two 
camps, one believing that the source of all their pros- 



AGITATION AND UNREST 21 

perity is in the protective tariff, llie other equally con- 
vinced that the tariff is tlie root of all evils. The 
expectation was great that Mr. Roosevelt would revise 
the tariff, revise it downward in the interest of the 
people and relieve them of the heavy exactions which 
the Dingley tariff, enacted in the McKinley adminis- 
tration, imposed upon them. The expectation was 
natural. Mr. Roosevelt had challenged abuse, he 
had laid the ax of reform at more than one iniquity, 
and the greatest of all abuses, the one whose iniquities 
pressed hardest, was the high tariff, according to 
its opponents. Mr. Roosevelt's passion for reform 
was restrained by a political superstition more 
potent than reason : the belief that the political party 
that revises the tariff invites defeat at the next election. 
The Republican party, that was still the party of 
McKinley, even though the young reformer was its 
titular head, was content to respect this superstition 
and not hazard fate. After seven years of power Mr. 
Roosevelt left the tariff untouched. 

Mr. Taft was elected by a vote large enough to 
suggest that the struggle in the convention left no 
heart-burnings, and that the country welcomed the 
perpetuation of the McKinley-Roosevelt regime. Mr. 
Taft was never the unanimous choice of his party, 
and he was soon to learn this. The adherents of 
Mr. Roosevelt had hoped he would again be the 
candidate of the party, and when this was impossible 
they accepted Mr. Taft because they had no alter- 



22 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

native, but without enthusiasm, grudgingly and 
reluctantly, looking forward to enduring the next 
four years and then to bringing Mr. Roosevelt back. 
The demand for the revision of the tariff was now 
so insistent it could not be ignored, and Mr. Taft, 
as a matter of duty, urged revision upon Congress. 
The bill was not perfect, — it is doubtful if a perfect 
tariff bill can ever be made, — but Mr. Taft could 
sign it without wrench of conscience, although some 
of the schedules did not satisfy him. But the country, 
led by the demagogic press and the men who were 
eagerly seeking an opportunity to weaken the adminis- 
tration and prevent Mr. Taft's renomination so as to 
clear the way for Mr. Roosevelt, found only fault 
in the measure. The law of 1828 was called the tariff 
of abominations ; this was a tariff of dishonor, accord- 
ing to its opponents, as disgraceful to the men by whose 
votes it was enacted as it was a betrayal of the cove- 
nant by the President who signed it. Bitterly and 
continuously attacked by his own party and not 
spared by his political opponents, it is not surprising 
that the people believed Mr. Taft to be weak and 
cowardly, and that he was the creature of the great 
predatory interests who were under the special 
guardianship of the Republican party. No more un- 
scrupulous cabal has been known in politics ; no man 
was more maligned or more indecently treated by 
men who wore under every obligation to treat him 
fairly. While this injustice in one sense accom- 



AGITATION AND UNREST 23 

plished its purpose, the results were far difTeront from 
what its instigators hoped for. Mr. Roosevelt, yield- 
ing to his ambition and the selfish advice of men who 
hope<l to climb to exalted or petty office on his suc- 
cess, announced himself as a candidate of the Pro- 
gressive party for the Presidency, Mr. Taft was 
renominated by the Republicans, and Mr. Wilson, 
whose term as Governor of New Jersey had not then 
expired, was nominated by the Democrats. 

For the second time in American politics the party 
in the majority lost the Presidency through internecine 
strife. In 1860 the newly formed Republican party 
was in the minority, but a hopeless division in the 
Democratic convention between the radicals and con- 
servatives over slavery led to a split and the 
nomination of two candidates, whose combined vote 
was larger than that cast for Mr. Lincoln, the 
Republican candidate; and it was one of the taunts 
leveled at Mr. Lincoln that he was "a minority 
President." In 1912 history repeated itself. Mr. 
Roosevelt and Mr. Taft split the Republican vote, 
thus insuring the election of Mr. Wilson, who, like 
his great predecessor, was termed in reproach by some 
of his more violent opponents "a minority President", 
although his title was clear. 

4 

WTiether Mr. Wilson would have been elected had 
there been no factional fight in the Republican party 



24 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

is an entertaining but idle speculation, but the effect 
of the agitation of the last few years and the attacks 
on Mr. Taft and his administration were now having 
their result. Mr. Roosevelt had disappointed the 
country. He had kept things in a ferment, he had 
been the most potent instrument to encourage dis- 
satisfaction and create unrest, but of real accomplish- 
ment he could claim almost nothing. He found abuses 
and left them undisturbed, and while he had a great 
following, dazzled by his brilliancy, his ready speech 
and his restlessness, that kept him constantly in the 
public gaze, as a political or party leader, in the real 
sense of the word, he was a failure because he stood 
for no great policy and was identified with no great 
movement or reform. One of his judicious critics — 
doubtless unconsciously recalling Hazlitt : "No man 
is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The 
test of greatness is the page of history" — said of him 
that he had a great personality, but "personality 
ends at the grave." He had not the genius to build 
empires, nor had he the plodding industry and the 
singleness of purpose that make a man of mediocre 
abilities a successful administrator. "History is 
achievement," this critic remarked, "and the im- 
mortal figures of history are the men who have 
achieved, who did something, noble or infamous. It 
was jNIr. Roosevelt's misfortune that too many sub- 
jects too vividly interested him, and he scattered his 
energies over a field so large that he merely scratched 



AGITATION AND UNREST 25 

the surface instead of plowiiifj deep." There is per- 
haps much truth in this short summary. 

Mr. Roosevelt, having been tried and liaving failed 
to meet the test to the disappointment of the public, 
the public, with characteristic illogicality, vented 
upon Mr. Taft its displeasure. Mr. Taft believed 
that under the administration of his predecessor there 
had grown up a carelessness for the strict letter of the 
law and the restrictions of the Constitution that 
threatened stability and the safety of institutions; 
that the country had become dangerously radical 
and it was his duty to restore the balance and uphold 
the supremacy of the law. Unfortunately for Mr. 
Taft's peace of mind and personal fortunes he failed 
to understand that Mr. Roosevelt was symptomatic 
of his time, and what to superficial observers seemed 
the dangerous taint of radicalism, a passing social 
fever that could be cured by the palliative treatment 
of wise legislation, had now become chronic. 

The evils that Mr. Cleveland with dignity and 
courage corrected, and the agitation begun by Mr. 
Bryan and kept alive by Mr. Roosevelt had given the 
people if not a clearer at least a different under- 
standing of the relation that ought to exist between 
them and government. For many years they had 
looked upon politics as an intricate game in which 
nominally they took the largest part and held the 
trump cards, and although they played it and pretended 
they knew what they were doing, in private they con- 



26 WOODROW \VILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

fessed they knew nothing, that instead of being the 
players they were merely marionettes with the strings 
in the hands of a few men of skill or cunning. Their 
eyes had been opened, and they saw that politics was 
something more than a game in which the players 
changed sides, and that government had a vital, a 
more solemn meaning than the tax gatherer and the 
policeman. They had long remained in ignorance of 
the truth that the framework of society is political, 
that their welfare, their comfort and their happiness 
could not be dissociated from politics, that there 
could be no advancement independent of government, 
but only through the efforts of government. To the 
faithful whose creed that the best governed country 
is the least governed country, this was heretical, an 
entirely wrong and irregular concept of government, 
and shocking to the disciples of individualism, to 
whom paternalism is a thing of reproach, who con- 
ceived the function of government to be merely to 
impose taxes and punish the offender in the name of 
society. 

5 

The Puritan made America what she is, and al- 
though the admixture of the blood of many foreign 
races has diluted the strain of Puritanism its spirit 
survives. To the Puritan his religion was not a 
thing apart from life but the very essence of life; it 
was not simply a religious code but a rule of conduct, 



AGITATION AND UNREST 27 

political as well as moral ; not a cloak to be worn only 
on Sunday but the garb in which men worked as well 
as played; they wore it joyously when no danger 
threatened and wore it proudly when death was 
faced. Without the grim power of expression of the 
Puritan, but with the same grim determination, the 
children of the Puritan were proving their heritage. 
Unconsciously they were following in his footsteps, 
like him they were vexed with doubts, like him they 
were searching their souls, like him they were con- 
tinually asking why and wanting to have the great 
mystery explained. It was not, however, the meaning 
and mystery of death that appalled them, it was the 
meaning and mystery of the inequalities, the injustice, 
the brutality of life. The masses are often deluded 
by words, but only for an instant, as progress is 
reckoned, are they deluded by false principles. They 
had been content to believe that poverty was as in- 
evitable as death, that misery was the wisdom of God 
that might not be questioned, that suffering and hunger 
had always been. The truth of these things they 
doubted but could not deny, but they groped in 
their blindness and dumb rage until the falsity of 
what they had been told became clear. "What had 
been in their hearts but found no voice was voiced 
for them. They were no longer content to accept 
poverty, toil, suffering as their normal lot ; it was not 
the visitation of God but the iniquity of man. What 
man had done man could undo, and the weapon to 



28 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

dethrone the oppressor, to hberate them, was poHtics. 
The way of escape was through the government, 
government that would do justice to all men, treat 
all men with the same impartiality, make it impossible 
for a few men to lord it over their fellows. 

There was nothing surprising about this. It was 
the same aspiration that the masses have always had, 
the same resentment they have always shown; only 
now the masses were more intelligent than they had 
ever been, more cohesive, more readily responsive to 
leadership and suggestion, better able to understand 
the selfishness of those over them and to see that ref- 
ormation, to be real and lasting and to root out in- 
equality and injustice, must be built on the solid 
foundation of truth and justice, and the fellowship 
of man must be a living force. It would be mis- 
leading the reader to convey the impression that what 
has been thus hastily sketched found its expression in 
concrete form. Thought is born long before it be- 
comes articulate. Ideas exist, but not before they 
are quickened into life is the world richer. What men 
thought and beheved they could not express, but they 
could feel. There was ceaseless agitation and dis- 
cussion, vagrant thoughts floated to the surface like 
bubbles from the unfathomed depth, some of them to 
glitter for a moment in the sun and burst and disappear 
into the void before they could be grasped by eager 
hands. But other thoughts floated on the stream; 
they carried the seed of life, they were fertilized by the 



AGITATION AND UNREST 21) 

contact of minds and bore llieir fruit. Men were 
ready to try an experiment and to see whether llieir 
theories were workable. 

It has been thought advisable to give this brief 
resum^ of the state of public opinion preceding ]\Ir. 
Wilson's entry into politics because many Americans 
under the pressure of their own intimate affairs only 
imperfectly realize the great intellectual revolution 
of which they were a part; and to foreigners, now so 
keenly interested in everything pertaining to America, 
this insight into American social development may 
not be unwelcome. It is necessary, moreover, be- 
cause it makes more comprehensible the difficulties 
Mr. Wilson had to contend with and the reason he 
was able to overcome them. 



CHAPTER III 
The :Man 



It was not surprising that Mr. Wilson should have 
been selected as the Democratic candidate for the 
Presidency. Men were looking for a champion rather 
than a political leader in the ordinary use of that word ; 
one who thought as they did, who shared with them 
their aspirations and held the same ideals. The 
division in the Republican party insured the election 
of the Democratic candidate, unless the Democrats 
were so foolish as to nominate a candidate who did not 
have the confidence of the public, a species of political 
folly of which they had more than once been guilty. 
Victory was theirs if they displayed prudence and com- 
mon sense, and it was incumbent upon them to pass 
over the claims of hack politicians and select a man 
truly representative of the prevailing spirit, who 
would antagonize neither the workingman distrustful 
of promises never fulfilled, nor his employer fearful of 
the radicalism of impractical theorists. 

Mr. Wilson measured up to these requirements. As 
Governor of New Jersey he had served his political 

30 



THE MAN 31 

novitiate. The governorship of a State, he had said, 
"is very hke a small presidency; or, rather, the presi- 
dency is very like a big governorshij)." When he was 
elected Governor, his friends knew that he had been 
put in training for the higher office. Mr. Wilson 
must have known this himself, must of course have 
had the natural and proper ambition to enter the 
larger field of service and reach the Presidency. It 
was as an unknown quantity he went to the Governor's 
oflfice in 1910; the nominations would not be made 
until 1912, and he had two years, if he were the or- 
dinary politician, in which to build up his machine, to 
steer the nice course between the rocks of radicalism 
and the shoals of conservatism, so skillfully to trim his 
sails that every passing breeze and every cross current 
could be availed of to bring him to harbor. 

If he entered the Governor's chair as the unknown 
quantity politically, in those two years he stamped his 
individuality upon the country, and put his impress 
upon legislation. No one now need further to ques- 
tion who he was or what he stood for, the principles 
he believed in or the rule of conduct he had adopted 
for himself. He had shown that he was possessed of 
a stubborn political courage that was at times some- 
what disconcerting to his more timid admirers who 
could only see the impolicy of making enemies when 
political adroitness required he should be making only 
friends ; forgetting that valuable as friends are to a 
politician even more valuable are enemies judiciously 



32 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

selected. His honesty and his adherence to the 
pledges he made before election alienated powerful 
interests; his determination to be the representative 
of the people instead of the spokesman of a party 
angered hack politicians, who had won no battles by 
those tactics. To them it was ingratitude and a 
violation of the fundamental principle of politics that 
to the victors belong the spoils of victory. It was 
exactly what might have been predicted of an amateur 
in politics, of the theoretical professor whose mind 
still worked in the narrow confines of the classroom, 
and to whom the legislature was only a larger faculty. 
And Mr. Wilson had another fault that was annoying 
to the party workers, each of them believing himself 
to be a king maker in his own fief or barony and en- 
titled to the respect and deference that belong to 
power and prominence. Vanity is the universal 
quality, in men no less than in women; it is perhaps 
stronger in the human race than any other passion or 
emotion, and there is no class of men whose vanity is 
greater than the politician's. He lives for it and on it. 
Vanity is the impelling motive to make the majority 
of men take to politics, and having tasted of it they 
cannot forego it. Every man elected to high office, 
every governor or senator or President, is never al- 
lowed to forget that he owes his election to the fidelity, 
intelligence and industry of the particular politician 
who at the moment is seeking his just reward for his 
invaluable services, and he really believes, it becomes 



THE MAN 33 

with him an obsession, that bul for him the election 
would have been lost. 

Nothing more deeply wounds the sensitive soul of 
the professional politician than to have his merits ig- 
nored. He not only wants to shine in the light of re- 
flected greatness, which is as pleasing to vanity as 
admiration to a woman no longer young, but to capi- 
talize it and increase his importance by creating the 
belief among his constituents and supporters of his 
influence with the great. Men who thought Mr. 
Wilson was under obligation to them, that to them he 
owed his election and must show his gratitude and be 
sensible of their political wisdom and judgment by 
consulting them and being guided by their experience, 
had their pride hurt and their vanity wounded when 
they learned they had no influence mth the Governor, 
who did not consider they had any special claim upon 
him. It was not they but the people to whom he 
owed obligation; he had no duty except to himself 
and the people. In Governor Wilson the chagrined 
politicians found a man who was willing to take coun- 
sel when he sought it, and after listening often dis- 
regarded it; who was self-confident to the verge of 
obstinacy; who, tyro though he was in politics, had 
the political instinct to disregard the old formulas of 
the textbooks and adopt methods of his own devising, 
which generally proved to be correct; preferring to 
grapple in solitude with his problems and unassisted 
find their solution. It brought him the accusation of 



34 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

being too self-centered to become a great leader, too 
distrustful of and too remote from the people to ap- 
peal to them or to hold their favor. Mortified vanity 
found its explanation in the contempt the professional 
has for the bungling amateur. Here was the theo- 
retical professor whose mind still worked in the nar- 
row confines of the classroom, and to whom the legis- 
lature was only a larger faculty. 

2 

We are to deal with a man who in his youth read the 
Constitution of the United States and the political 
history of his country and made a discovery. It is 
the privilege of youth to make discoveries, to allow 
their enthusiasm to carry them away, to believe with 
all the fiery splendor of youth they have come to re- 
deem the world, and a few years later to have their 
illusions humorously broken by experience. 

We are to deal with a man who, having made his 
discovery, never wavered and who thirty years later 
was to be given the opportunity to make practical 
application of his theories. He had the genius to see 
that a political system with the respect of age, ac- 
cepted to carry out the purpose of its designers, had, 
through sheer accident, become perverted, and in- 
stead of being the perfect instrument it was supposed 
to be was in practice vicious. Seeing this he had the 
courage to declare what he believed. Believing this 
he had even the greater courage, when given power. 



THE MAN 35 

to apply the remedy. It is not of consequence lo 
discuss whether his theory of government is right 
or wrong, whether he read the Constitution correctly 
and understood the purpose of the men who frame* 1 
it or distorted it to suit his own ideas ; what is of 
importance is intelligently to understand the prin- 
ciples which governed him. 

Mr. Wilson believed that the framers of the Con- 
stitution had intended one thing and circumstances 
had made it another. Bagehot showed that the "lit- 
erary theory" — the expression is Bagehot's — of 
the British Constitution was at variance with its 
practical working. Mr, Wilson found that the nicely 
adjusted theoretical checks and balances of the Amer- 
ican Constitution existed in fiction only, and that the 
Government of the United States was a government 
by Congressional Committee. The standing commit- 
tees of Congress had usjirped not only the power of 
Congress itself and become more powerful than their 
creators, but they had also cheapened the importance 
of the President and destroyed all sense of responsi- 
bility. It was that more than anything — govern- 
ment by Congressional Committee without respon- 
sibility — he regarded as vicious and subversive of 
proper government. This is the thesis of "Con- 
gressional Government", set forth in a very remark- 
able way. Throughout the book he shows how the 
intent of the makers of the Constitution had been 
corrupted, and in his conclusion, summarizing what 



36 WOODROW WILSON: AN mTERPRETATION 

he has written, he says : "This is the defect to which, 
it will be observed, I am constantly recurring; to 
which I recur again and again because every examina- 
tion of the system, at whatsoever point begun, leads 
inevitably to it as a central secret." He saw the 
weakness of a system that destroyed responsibility, 
and knew that eflficient government was impossible 
unless at its head was a responsible leader. "Nobody 
stands sponsor for the policy of the government," he 
writes. "A dozen men originate it; a dozen com- 
promises twist and alter it; a dozen offices whose 
names are scarcely known outside of Washington put 
it into execution." How was this disintegration which 
destroyed responsibility to be corrected and the gov- 
ernment again to become integrated and responsibility 
centered? Mr. Wilson had always been, and remains 
to-day, a strong Hamiltonian. In a political system 
so peculiar as that of the United States, clearly the 
one person who was intended to have both power and 
responsibility, who should have not only the right to 
plan but also the duty to execute, was the President. 
But of this power he had been robbed, and he was 
now reduced to the level of a constitutional monarch 
who reigned but did not rule. Turning to England 
he saw there a system which made the Prime Min- 
ister the responsible executive, who originated and 
carried out a policy, while in America, in normal 
times, although theoretically the President had the 
authority of the sovereign and his ministry, the Presi- 



THE MAN 37 

dency, to use his own words, "is too silent and inactive, 
too little a premiership and too much like a superin- 
tendency", and Congress had the power that under a 
constitutional form of government was the i)rerogative 
of the ministry. It was not repugnant, in his opinion, 
to democratic ideas to make Congress the fountain- 
head of authority, even if it were a perversion of the 
intent of the framers of the Constitution, provided 
Congress in assuming authority also accepted re- 
sponsibility; the power, in short, that did not place 
in separate hands "the right to plan from the duty to 
execute"; but what to him was vicious and made 
coherent government impossible was power so mi- 
nutely divided that responsibility for its exercise could 
never be placed. 

The Government of England is the Prime INIinister, 
who is not only the real Executive but is also the head 
of his political party, and he remains the Executive 
and retains his political primacy so long as he has the 
support of his party and the country. His function 
is to originate policies and to carry them out through 
his majority in parliament, to coordinate and direct 
the work of his associates ; for their ability and effi- 
ciency he is responsible; he is the final authority. 
Mr. Wilson beheved that the President ought properly 
to occupy the same relation to the country and his 
party; that the President must be invested with the 
same power to carry out legislative policies that the 
president of a business corporation has to supervise 



38 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

its affairs ; that under a system of government re- 
sponsive to the will of the people statesmanship can- 
not be dissociated from party ; and in language so 
direct that it admits of no misinterpretation he gave 
expression to this belief long before there was the 
slightest thought in the public mind that he would be 
called to the Presidency. 

He did not propose to go outside of the Constitution 
or to take any liberties with the charter ; the restric- 
tions imposed upon the President would be scrupu- 
lously observed, but as he read the Constitution and 
peered into the thoughts of the men who made it, he 
was able to convince himself that they intended one 
thing and circumstances made another. "The Presi- 
dent of the United States," Mr. Wilson writes in "Con- 
stitutional Government in the United States", was 
"intended by the makers of the Constitution to be a 
reformed and standardized king, after the Whig model ; 
and Congress was meant to be a reformed and properly 
regulated Parliament." So much for intention, "but 
both President and Congress have broken from the 
model and adapted themselves to circumstances, after 
a thoroughly American fashion — partly because the 
King and Parliament which the convention of 1787 
intended to copy, with modifications, had no real 
existence and were therefore largely theoretical." 
And when theory that had no existence in fact was 
succeeded by fact that would not yield to theory 
President and Congress "were sure to undergo rapid 



THE MAN ;}!) 

alteration in one direction or another, and oaeli lias 
taken its own course of change. It would be difficult 
now to believe that the American President and the 
English King, the American Congress and the English 
Parliament, were originally of the same model and 
intention if we did not clearly recollect the fact to 
be so." 

He had seen the weakness of a political system that 
was the creature of accident rather than design and 
stressed it. "This is the defect to which I am con- 
stantly recurring," he writes in "Congressional Gov- 
ernment", and that defect was that "nobody stands 
sponsor for the policy of the government." Years of 
reflection had not modified this judgment. "The 
whole art of statesmanship," he wrote in 1907 in 
"Constitutional Government", "is the art of bringing 
the several parts of government into effective co- 
operation for the accomplishment of particular com- 
mon objects, — and party objects at that." Here 
jVIt. Wilson has, in a few words, given us his political 
creed. The remedy, in a word, for what he com- 
plained of was responsible party leadership. The 
American Presidency should cease to be merely a 
superintendency and become a premiership. 



We have only to examine his writings to see how 
much Mr. Wilson deprecated the obscurity into which 
the Presidencv had fallen and how firm his conviction 



40 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

that the President must not be merely the signer of 
laws but also the maker of them, acting through his 
party in Congress as the British Prime Minister does ; 
that efficient government was impossible unless at its 
head was a responsible leader, and in America that 
leader must be the President. From 1865 to 1896, 
he writes in "Constitutional Government", "no 
President except Mr. Cleveland played a leading and 
decisive part in the quiet drama of our national life. 
Even Mr. Cleveland may be said to have owed his 
great role in affairs rather to his own native force and 
the confused politics of the time, than to any oppor- 
tunity of leadership naturally afforded him by a 
system which had subordinated so many Presidents 
before him to Congress." Always that, always a sys- 
tem inherently vicious that subordinated the Presi- 
dent to Congress ; always, it is easy to see, the long- 
ing that a man with force and many-sided character 
would arise to destroy the system and again enthrone 
the President supreme. Did Mr. Wilson, while writ- 
ing as a philosopher, publish his political creed and 
see in himself the leader he waited for.!^ We cannot 
tell, but it is more than remarkable that to him should 
have come the opportunity to destroy the system that 
he so vigorously condemned. 

But while Mr. Wilson saw the Presidency reduced 
from its former high estate he also saw that given the 
right man, a man of force, character and devotion, the 
office could be restored to what he believed it ought 



THE MAN 41 

to be; that, contrary to general belief, it was not the 
oflBce that made its incumbent great, but the in- 
cumbent who had it in his power to shed luster upon 
the office ; which perhaj)s explains why the Presi- 
dency has seemed so small when it was in the tem- 
porary occupation of some of the Presidents. Read 
what Mr. Wilson has written and then see what he 
has done, and it is as if writing always with the calm 
air of philosophical detachment he is saying for all men 
to hear : ''This is the portrait of the perfect President; 
this is the President I shall be when I am given the 
opportunity." Not once but a dozen times we are 
given this insight. "The President is at liberty, both 
in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can," 
he says, showing that neither the law nor his conscience 
sets any limit upon the President's greatness. *'The 
personal force of the President is perfectly constitu- 
tional to aay extent to which he chooses to exercise it," 
we are told. The secret of successful government is 
personality, an English writer has said, and assuredly 
few men have so peculiarly impressed their personality 
upon a government as Mr. Wilson. He knows the 
power of the President if only the President has in him 
the element of power. "He is the one person who 
can form opinion by his own direct influence and act 
upon the whole country at once;" and if he is "a 
great person" and great as an orator then "he has the 
ear of the nation as of course, and a great person may 
use such an advantage greatly." Mr. Wilson has 



42 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

known how to use his advantage greatly. Let the 
President "once win the admiration and confidence of 
the country, and no other single force can withstand him, 
no combination of forces will easily overpower him." 
Many other quotations might be given, but are not these 
enough to prove that Mr. Wilson had clearly defined 
ideas of what the Presidency ought to be and that it 
could be made as great as the great person who held it ? 
Some of Mr. Wilson's predecessors have believed 
that the President may with propriety recommend to 
Congress such measures as he deems expedient — as 
the Constitution specifically requires him to do — and 
thus through Congress advise the country, but he may 
not without being guilty of impropriety attempt to 
lead ; to do so would be misfeasance, which would 
properly merit the rebuke of Congress and the resent- 
ment of the country. That is not the view Mr. Wilson 
takes, to whom the Presidency is more than a dis- 
embodied voice ; nor has he any fear that the country 
resents the leadership of the President, but, on the con- 
trary, he is convinced the country welcomes it and looks 
to the President for inspiration and guidance. The 
people, he says, "have again and again, as often as they 
were afforded the opportunity, manifested their satis- 
faction when he has boldly accepted the role of leader, 
to which the peculiar origin and character of his author- 
ity entitle him. The Constitution bids him speak, and 
times of stress and change must more and more thrust 
upon him the attitude of originator of policies." 



THE M.VN 43 

And it is that, "the originator of poHcies", the 
leader of his party, in other words, the President as 
Premier, that Mr, Wilson conceives to be the real 
function of the President. He is, it is true, the Execu- 
tive; he becomes such when he takes the oath of 
office, as the Prime Minister of England is nominally 
"one of the King's servants", but the President is 
more than a mere executive, as the Prime Minister is 
greater even than the servant of a king. Nor is it 
necessary that the President shall attempt to hide his 
leadership as some Presidents have done, or exercise 
it furtively, or deny it while still exercising it. Mr. 
Wilson, of course, is not the first President to assert 
that by virtue of his office he is the political head of 
his party, but this hegemony has not been stressed 
for reasons that are a curious mixture of hypocrisy 
and virtue. The public knows that the President is 
a party man and a politician and has the interests of 
his party at heart, yet the public would like to be- 
lieve that elevation to the Presidency has exalted 
him, that it has purified him, and the politician of 
yesterday, who is to-day the President, has risen 
above the petty affairs of party and has ceased to 
think of politics. Mr. Wilson would have the Presi- 
dent boldly avow his leadership ; more than that, Mr. 
Wilson sees that it cannot be disguised because it is 
self-evident and manifest. It is becoming more and 
more true, he says, "as the business of the government 
becomes more and more complex and extended, that 



44 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the President is becoming more and more a political 
and less and less an executive officer. His executive 
powers are in commission, while his political powers 
more and more center and accumulate upon him and 
are in their very nature personal and inalienable." 
The duty of a statesman, Mr. Wilson asserts, is to 
"give the Government its best force and synthesis", 
and "no one can play the leading part in such a mat- 
ter with more influence or propriety than the Presi- 
dent. If he have character, modesty, devotion and 
insight, as well as force, he can bring the contending 
elements of the system together into a great and 
efficient body of common counsel." 

4 

Congress may try to subordinate the President, and 
there have been times when the President has been 
compelled to yield to Congress, but in certain emer- 
gencies the nature of his office will make the weakest 
President more powerful than the most imperious Con- 
gress. The direction of foreign afiFairs being solely in- 
trusted to the President he can bend Congress to his 
submission. Mr. Wilson, lifting the veil, saw the 
dominant position the President must occupy in a 
great international crisis involving the United States 
or a war in which the United States was engaged. In 
the preface to the fifteenth edition of "Congressional 
Government", published in 1900, he writes: 

"When foreign affairs play a prominent part in the 



THE MAN 45 

politics and policies of a nation, its Executive must 
of necessity be its guide; niiisl ulter every initial 
judgment, take every first step of action, supply the 
information upon which it is to act, suggest and in a 
large measure control its conduct." This, it will be 
recalled, was written after the close of war with Spain, 
and the efifect of that war upon America led Mr. 
Wilson to say: "The President of the United States 
is now, as of course, at the front of affairs, as no Presi- 
dent, except Lincoln, has been since the first quarter 
of the nineteenth century, when the foreign relations 
of the new nation had first to be adjusted. There is 
no trouble now about getting the President's speeches 
printed and read, every word. Upon his choice, his 
character, his experience hang some of the most 
weighty issues of the future. The government of de- 
pendencies must be largely in his hands. Interesting 
things may come out of the change." He saw one of 
the things to come out of the change, for in "Constitu- 
tional Government" a few years later he said : 

"Our President must always, henceforth, be one of 
the great powers of the world, whether he act greatly 
or wisely or not, and the best statesman we can pro- 
duce will be needed to fill the office of Secretary of 
State. We have but begun to see the presidential 
oflSce in this light ; but it is the light which will more 
and more beat upon it, and more and more determine 
its character and its effect upon the politics of the 
nation. We can never hide our President again as 



46 WOODROW WTXSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

a mere domestic officer. We can never again see him 
the mere executive he was in the thirties and forties. 
He must stand always at the front of our affairs, and 
the office will be as big and as influential as the man 
who occupies it." 

There again the reference to the man making the 
Presidency and not the Presidency making the man. 
That thought was ever uppermost in Mr. Wilson's 
mind, and it is certain no man ever came to the Presi- 
dency who was less awed by it than he. Most Presi- 
dents, as we gather from their correspondence and 
biographers, in their humility, a humility perhaps some- 
times assumed as becomes the humble servant of the 
people,' were fearful because they were so insignificant 
and the office was so vast; to Mr. Wilson it never 
assumed the aspect of a tyrant. It did not terrify 
him because it was a giant only in imagination. The 
wand was in his hands. As he willed, the Presidency 
had the stature and strength of a giant, of whom he 
was always the master, or shrank into the insignificance 
of a dwarf. 

5 

Believing that the correct function of the President 
in the American political system was not alone that of 
the political executive corresponding to the British 
Prime Minister, whose power is derived from his party 
and clothes him with responsible authority, it naturally 
follows that Mr. Wilson should also regard the Presi- 



THE MAN 47 

dent as the leader of Iiis party. The whole art of 
statesmanship, he declared, as we have already noted, 
''is the art of bringing the several parts of the govern- 
ment into effective cooi)eration for the accomj)lish- 
nient of particular common objects, — and party ob- 
jects at that." In other words, Mr. Wilson is a stout 
party man, and because he believes in parties as 
necessary to representative government he has often 
been charged with "playing politics." The accusation 
is both true and false. If it is to be understood in its 
common acceptance, if it is meant to imply that for 
the sake of mere partisan advantage Mr. Wilson is 
willing to sacrifice principle or to resort to unworthy 
methods to embarrass his political opponents, the 
charge does him an injustice ; but it is perfectly true 
that Mr. Wilson, being a Democrat, believes that the 
government can be best administered by Democrats 
and that political rewards properly belong to Demo- 
crats, who are entitled to the first consideration for 
the sake of the party. Mr. Wilson has frankly said 
so, and with equal frankness he has shown that it is 
possible for a man to be a politician as well as a states- 
man, and while a statesman is a term of respect a 
politician need not necessarily be a reproach. 

In England, party leaders, INIr. Wilson writes in 
"Constitutional Government", are "interchangeably 
'politicians' and 'statesmen'", while in America "the 
distinction we make between 'politicians' and 'states- 
men' is pecuharly our own." In other countries 



48 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

"where the words or their equivalents are used, the 
statesman differs from the poHtician only in capacity 
and in degree, and is distinguished as a public leader 
only in being a greater figure on the same stage, whereas 
with us politicians and statesmen differ in kind." He 
explains that the politician "is a man who manages 
the organs of the party outside the open field of gov- 
ernment", while the statesman "is the leader of public 
opinion, the immediate director (under the politicians) 
of executive or legislative policy, the diplomat, the 
recognized public servant"; but clearly, in the better 
sense, it is possible for a man to be both politician and 
statesman, and evidently Mr. Wilson would not re- 
gard it as offensive to be called a politician. Because 
a man is the President it does not debar him being the 
political manager of his party. "The President may 
also, if he will," Mr. Wilson declares, "stand within 
the party councils and use the advantage of his power 
and personal force to control its actual programs. 
He may be both the leader of his party and the leader 
of the nation, or h^ may be one or the other. If he 
lead the nation, his party can hardly resist him. His 
office is anything he has the sagacity and force to 
make it." 

Here, once more, Mr. Wilson gives utterance to his 
dominant thought : it is the man who makes the office 
great, and not the office that can make a little man great. 

One may be sure that given the opportunity to 
make the Presidency what he believed it ought to be. 



THE MAN 49 

his inflexible will ami purpose would force Congress 
no less than the country to recognize in him not only 
the leader of his party in the parliamentary sense but 
also the leader of the nation ; that he was responsible 
for its policies, that his duty, as he conceived it, was 
first to plan and then to execute, that if he achieved 
success or met w^ith failure he, and he alone, was 
entitled to be given credit in the one case or con- 
demned in the other. 

IMr. Wilson must have wanted his position known, 
he must have known, having spent all his life watch- 
ing minds at work, that no matter how often a man 
says the same thing in a dynamic age it will attract 
little attention unless he can create a dramatic back- 
ground and spectacular surroundings. And what 
more dramatic background can a man ask than the 
Presidency of the United States ! It was not with- 
out a spice of gentle malice with just suflBcient sting to 
prick and not draw blood, that in Staunton, Virginia, 
on December 28, 1912, a few weeks after his election, 
he said that people were now seeing "that in view of 
the things that I have said since I was nominated, 
which are exactly the same things I have said before 
I was nominated, they are no longer afraid of me. 
By which I draw this simple conclusion, that they did 
not read the things that I said before I was nom- 
inated, and that after I was nominated it became 
worth their while really to find out what I did actually 
say. 



50 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Mr. Wilson took early occasion to say to the coun- 
try what he felt his position to be. Addressing Con- 
gress on June 23, 1913, only a little more than three 
months after his inauguration, urging the passage of 
a law to reform the banking and currency system, he 
said: "I have come to you as the head of the Gov- 
ernment and the responsible leader of the party in 
power." It was somewhat of a shock to the public 
to hear the President boldly proclaim himself the 
leader of his party and its political chieftain ; it sounded 
curiously to American ears, accustomed as they had 
been for long years to listening to the President sub- 
scribing to a self-denying ordnance renouncing politics 
when he came to the Presidency and in the voice of 
the miserable sinner penitently declaring himself to be 
a lowly follower and the devoted servant of the people. 

It was so startling, this assertion of leadership and 
political primacy that it provoked discussion in the 
press. "Is the President by virtue of his office the 
leader of the American people?" one newspaper asked, 
and it proceeded to ascertain the facts. It conceded 
that in respect to legislation he undoubtedly is, for he 
is required by the Constitution to make recommenda- 
tions to Congress, but having done that his duties and 
responsibilities end. Having made his recommenda- 
tion. Congress, a coordinate body, over which the 
President has no power of coercion or control, may ac- 
cept or reject his recommendation as it sees fit. It was 
not intended that the President should be a leader; 



THE MAN 51 

his true function is to be an advisor, and he imisl sub- 
mit gracefully when Congress, in I lie exercise of its 
wisdom, rejects his advice. It is not necessary to 
pursue the subject further, l)ut it shows how little 
prepared the country was to accept the doctrine of 
the Presidency being a premiership, and how little 
it understood Mr. Wilson. 

In the following month he again proclaimed his 
leadership. On the fourth of July, speaking at Gettys- 
burg, he said: "I have been chosen the leader of the 
nation." It w^as a banal statement of an obvious fact 
that needed no enunciation if he meant simply to in- 
form his audience that he was the titular head of the 
nation, but we may be sure he had a deeper purpose 
and that deliberately he sought to impress upon the 
country his actual as well as his titular leadership. 
But to the country the words passed without meaning. 

Mr. Wilson has shown himself to be the "practical 
politician" by not underestimating the value and 
importance to be attached to the local offices. Poli- 
tics begins at the bottom, by exciting the enthusiasm 
and even the selfishness of the great mass of electors, 
many of whom are "party workers" and look for 
party rewards. IMr. Wilson recognizes this as not 
only natural but praiseworthy. "Local offices," he 
says in "Constitutional Government", "are indis- 
pensable to party discipline as rewards of local fidelity, 
as the visible and tangible objects of those who devote 
their time and energy to party organization and under- 



52 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

take to see to it that the full strength of the party 
vote is put forth when the several sections of the 
party are called upon to unite for national purposes." 
While not a machine politician he is still a believer in 
the party machine, without which the party could 
not exist. "Whatever their faults and abuses," he 
holds, "party machines are absolutely necessary under 
our existing electoral arrangements, and are neces- 
sary chiefly for keeping the several segments of parties 
together. No party manager could piece local major- 
ities together and make up a national majority, if local 
majorities were mustered upon non-partisan grounds. 
No party manager can keep his lieutenants to their 
business who has not control of local nominations." 

6 

A biographer must set forth if he can the materials 
for the severest judgment on his subject, is the dictum 
of Lord Charnwood, one of the most delightful of 
modern biographers, whose severity is tempered by 
the admiration he so frankly expresses for Lincoln. 
Governed by that principle, the interpreter of Mr. 
Wilson, desiring to do him only justice but mindful 
of the honesty he owes to himself, will regret that 
Mr. Wilson frequently permitted his zeal for party to 
do what at times seemed to be the extreme of narrow 
partisanship and lowered the dignity of his great oflfice. 
He would undoubtedly have silenced criticism had he 
at the outbreak of the war reformed his Cabinet and 



THE MAN 53 

brought to his side one or two of the foremost men in 
the Repubhean party, and doing at once wliat cir- 
cumstances compelled him to do later, appointing 
Republicans to offices created by the exigencies of the 
war ; and furthermore, in abstaining from using his 
influence to promote the election to Congress of men 
for party reasons. The future historian will un- 
doubtedly see in these things a weakness in an other- 
wise strong character, too much thought given to 
politics when matters of greater moment should have 
engrossed attention. But it must not be forgotten 
that Mr. Wilson believed, and had not hesitated to 
say, that government could be carried on only by 
parties and not through coalition ; the Anglo-Saxon 
has a peculiar dislike of coalition governments ; they 
are as unpopular in England as they are in America, 
and they have been resorted to only in times of the 
greatest emergency. One of Mr. Wilson's objections 
to government by Congressional Committee, as he 
points out in "Congressional Government", is that 
the diluted responsibility of the Committee is still 
further attenuated by every Committee having a 
minority representation ; and he contrasts that un- 
favorably with the English system, where the Cabinet 
represents only the majority and the minority is de- 
prived of all voice, for the time being, in the manage- 
ment of the Government. 

Mr. Wilson's refusal to dismiss members of his 
Cabinet or other officials who incurred the displeasure 



54 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of the public was put down to excessive stubbornness, 
to a vanity that refused to acknowledge a mistake, to 
an exaggerated belief in his own inerrancy that would 
be childish were it not based on more solid founda- 
tion ; it was frequently explained and defended by his 
friends, who asserted Mr. Wilson was better able to 
know the capacity and qualifications of an official than 
the public, misled by partisan attack or well-meaning 
but mistaken zeal; but neither defense nor explana- 
tion satisfied the public, which, demanding a particu- 
lar head on a charger, was not to be appeased by being 
told the day of execution was indefinitely postponed. 

Yet Mr. Wilson's course, holding the views he does, 
was entirely logical and not merely the exercise of ar- 
bitrary power or the desire of a man obstinately weak 
determined to show his strength. On the theory of 
the Presidency being a premiership and the applica- 
tion of that theory to the principle of the office, the 
principle that in England makes the Prime Minister 
responsible for the acts of his appointees and their 
subordinates and in America would vest the Presi- 
dent with equal responsibility, the dismissal of an 
official in response to public clamor was impossible 
because it implied, and by acquiescence the President 
admitted, a want of confidence in the Administration 
and an interference with the prerogatives of the Presi- 
dent. In England it is always possible to test public 
sentiment by bringing on an adverse vote in the House 
of Commons, which the Prime Minister may chal- 



THE MAN 55 

lenge or defy, but he knows his risk aiul thai his resig- 
nation must follow as a matter of course in case of 
defeat. In America tlie machinery is more comph- 
cated and functions with less celerity ; the people 
can express their confidence in the Administration or 
withhold it by defeating the party of the Administra- 
tion at the mid-term Congressional elections, or by 
electing the President if he is a candidate for reelection, 
or defeating his party, if he does not aspire to be his 
own successor ; but as in England, the President knows 
his risk and knows the penalty he must pay when- 
ever he forfeits the confidence of the country. 

Entirely consistent, Mr. Wilson, in the summer of 
1918, opposed the reelection of those members of 
Congress who had opposed his measures or policies, on 
the ground that it was tantamount to a condemnation 
of his Administration. He resorted to no subterfuge 
in declaring his position. In a letter to a constituent 
of Senator Vardaman, of Mississippi, who was a can- 
didate for reelection, the President wrote : 

''Senator Vardaman has been conspicuous among 
the Democrats of the Senate for his opposition to the 
Administration. If the voters of Mississippi should 
again choose him to represent them, I not only have 
no right to object — I would have no right in any way 
to criticize them, but I should be obliged to accept 
their action as a condemnation of my Administration, 
and it is only right that they should know this before 
they act." 



56 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

In brief, then, if the Presidency is a premiership, it 
is not the prerogative of the country to dismiss an 
official, except the one responsible for all, the Presi- 
dent ; but it is the prerogative of the President to dis- 
miss any man who no longer satisfies him or who has 
failed to meet a certain standard ; and the President 
has exercised his prerogative more frequently than the 
public is generally aware. The resignation of a mem- 
ber of the Cabinet — "resignation" is the official 
euphemism for dismissal — is always made sensational 
because the public pictures a "scene" between two 
strong and passionate men, perhaps excited charges 
of bad faith, of disloyalty, of overweening ambition — 
the possibilities are endless to imagination ; and no 
less sensational is it when officials are unable to work 
in harmony, when recrimination is bandied about, 
and for the good of the service one, and sometimes both, 
must be dismissed. Of the men below Cabinet rank 
who have been allowed quietly to retire because they 
did not measure up to expectations or created friction 
the public has heard nothing, because Mr. Wilson 
does not believe that mere administrative details are 
properly reviewable at the bar of public opinion. 

7 

Whether Mr. Wilson's theory of the responsibilities 
and duties of the Presidency is correct, whether the 
framers of the Constitution intended that the Presi- 
dent should be a Premier rather than an Executive 



THE M.\N 57 

permitted to plan but denied the power to execute, 
whether a system that satisfies the requirements of 
British poHtics can be safely applied to American, in 
the one case the Premier holding office at the pleasure 
of the people while in the other the President's tenure 
is fixed and he can be removed only by impeachment — 
into these considerations it is unnecessary to enter. 
Their discussion would be proper in a polemical work 
dealing with opposing schools of government and 
constitutional interpretation, but they have no place 
in an attempt to interpret the character, motives and 
guiding principles of Woodrow Wilson. Two things, 
however, must be made clear to save the reader from 
confusion. It has already been said that in every- 
thing Mr. Wilson wrote as a student, when his dis- 
cussion of the presidential powers was academic, and 
everything he has done since coming to the Presidency 
has been without wrench to the Constitution. He has 
made no attempt to stretch the Constitution to meet 
his own views ; he has not transcended the constitu- 
tional boundaries surrounding the Executive, or in- 
vaded the province of the Legislature or the Judiciary 
as defined by the Constitution. This cannot be over- 
emphasized. 

And while frequent reference has been made to jNIr. 
Wilson's belief that the British parliamentary system 
is superior to the American system of Congressional 
government, this must not lead the reader to think 
that Mr. Wilson saw a merit in monarchical institu- 



58 \YOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

tions to the disparagement of republican. It was not 
the monarchical institutions of England that com- 
mended themselves to him, but the system of popular 
government; and above all, the system of integration 
by which one man, the Prime Minister, was made 
responsible for all that was done, instead of the disin- 
tegrating effect of numerous Congressional Committees 
that enabled every man to escape his just responsibility. 
Mr. Wilson had subjected the political systems of 
the two English-speaking peoples to the laboratory 
test. He had weighed, analyzed, measured, and the 
reaction had met the test of his theoretic formula. 
Long ago he had set up a model in his workshop, now 
he was to determine whether his ideas were sound or 
like the dream of the visionary inventor, theoretically 
sound but practically impossible. The man who at 
twenty-three saw the advantage of a system that cre- 
ated a Prime Minister as compared with the disad- 
vantage of a system that elected a President only to 
make him silent and inactive, was now, fortified by 
wisdom and experience, to come to his opportunity 
to make the Presidency what his reason and his con- 
science taught him it ought to be. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Enigma 
1 

Mr. Wilson matured early. At an age when char- 
acter is in the formative stage and minds are plastic, 
his character had become fixed and his mind had reached 
almost its full development. Two striking incidents 
in his career before he reached thirty prove this — the 
publication of "Congressional Government" and the 
abandonment of the law for pedagogy. It is not an 
uncommon thing for men to begin life in one profession 
and after a decent interval forsake it for another voca- 
tion, but such men have usually been unstable, with- 
out industry, naturally fond of change, or the creature 
of circumstance beyond their control. None of these 
reasons influenced Mr. Wilson. He had given proof of 
his industry and tenacity, the love of reckless adven- 
ture was not in him, no sudden crisis had come into 
his life. Deliberately and w4th a detached point of 
view very remarkable he was able to appraise himself ; 
he knew his owti powers and limitations, the thing he 
was best fitted for and that his heart was in. Other 
men have drifted into the law or medicine, found it 
disappointing or disheartening, but, too timid to begin 

59 



60 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

anew, have plugged along to failure. IVIr. Wilson had 
the courage to confess his mistake and to make a new 
start. 

"Congressional Government", to any one seeking 
to understand and interpret Woodrow Wilson, will 
repay careful reading. It is seldom that a youth of 
twenty-three is the author of a work that lives and 
becomes a classic, which in itself is suflBcient to stamp 
him as a man of whom much may be expected, but 
the book is of still greater interest. Neither in style 
nor treatment does it betray youth, its inexperience, 
passions or prejudices. There is about it the sure 
touch of the philosophical observer, who having rea- 
soned carefully and weighed dispassionately has reached 
the certain ground of conviction. The confidence Mr. 
Wilson had in his youth grew and strengthened with 
his years. The characters of few public men have 
so often been summed up in a single word, to no other 
public man perhaps have so many men of diverse in- 
tellects applied the same word as a characterization. 
Mr. Wilson's friends have said with an air of regret, 
as if recognizing an immedicable weakness, as his 
opponents have said with an air of finality, that he is 
too "self -centered." What they mean is that he was 
always sure of himself, that in him there were no doubts 
or hesitations such as mark the ordinary man, nor did 
he carefully balance with timidity the danger of action 
against the safety of compromise. To a friend who 
congratulated him on his judgment having been vin- 



THE ENIGMA 61 

dicated, although at the time his course was unpopuhir, 
Mr. Wilson replied: "I always try to keep my im- 
agination ahead of the facts." Imagination is as 
priceless a gift to the statesman as it is to the poet, but 
the poet does not need to curb his fancy with facts. 

As the twig is bent the tree inclines, and the early 
bent of Mr. ^Yilson's mind is palpable. In "Con- 
gressional Government" there is the same clear pres- 
entation of facts, the same terseness and lucidity that 
distinguish Mr. Wilson's later writings and make them, 
now that he has the whole world for audience, as full 
of meaning to foreigners as his own people, and as 
clear to the ignorant as to the lettered. 

The confidence Mr. Wilson has always had in the 
correctness of his own judgment since he entered public 
life, and especially since he became President, is clearly 
foreshadowed in his book. It would be conceit were 
it not wisdom, and time has proved the answer. He 
resorts to no doubts or qualifications, he does not 
nicely trim to escape responsibility, nor seek to evade 
for fear he is walking on unknown ground. He walks 
boldly because he feels the ground firm beneath him ; 
having sifted through his mind facts which develop 
their own conclusions he is sure of himself. The style 
is the man, we have so often been told, and certainly 
few men have so revealed themselves by their style as 
he. The style as well as the man was formed when of 
the experience of Hfe he knew little except what he had 
learned from himself. Experience and practice have 



62 WOODROW ^VILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

given Mr. Wilson a greater command of his art, a more 
rhythmical use of words, and, under the stress of emo- 
tion and since he has been addressing the world, he has 
not scrupled to let the world see the emotions that 
move him ; but a close student of " Congressional 
Government" and the state papers of the President 
must see that they are from the same hand. The 
identity is there, it extends to the dominating thought 
as well as the idiosyncrasies of style from which no 
writer escapes. 

Mr. Wilson's literary critics have been pained by his 
excessive fondness for the adjective "very" and have 
pointed out to him that the modification of a noun does 
not make for strength and is the one blemish on a style 
nearly perfect; but Mr. Wilson, in that respect per- 
haps as perverse as one of his former pupils, disdains 
the voice of counsel and persists in his literary sin. 
So early was this habit formed that the seventh word 
of "Congressional Government" is the "very" now so 
familiar in the later addresses and state papers ; so 
wedded is Mr. Wilson to his adjective that he goes out 
of his way to marry it to an adverb rather than forsake 
it. In the preface to the fifteenth edition to "Con- 
gressional Government", written in 1900, Mr. Wilson 
cannot resist the temptation of "very absolutely." 
This idiosyncrasy, and every writer has it — Conrad, 
for instance, perhaps the greatest master of English 
in our day, seemingly is unable to write a book without 
the frequent use of "certitude", a word few modern 



THE ENIGMA Cr5 

writers use — would not be worth mentioning were 
it not proof that Mr. Wilson has broadened with the 
years, but he has not changed. 

Indisputable evidence that President Wilson thinks 
now as the student of twenty-three thought is to be 
found in "Congressional Government", and it is evi- 
dence no less interesting to literature than it is to psy- 
chology. In "Congressional Government" Mr. Wil- 
son wrote: "There are voices in the air which cannot 
be misunderstood." Addressing Congress on January 
8, 1918, he elaborated the same figure: "There is, 
moreover, a voice calling for these definitions of prin- 
ciple and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more 
thrilling and more compelling than any of the moving 
voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. 
It is the voice of the Russian people." In the preface 
to the fifteenth edition of "Congressional Government ", 
Mr. Wilson wrote that its translation into French had 
caused him for the first time since its publication to 
read it, and it is doubtful if from that day to this he had 
occasion to look into its pages, yet eighteen years later 
we find him unconsciously using the thought of his 
youth. That he should use it does not imply poverty 
of imagination, what he had written must long since 
have been forgotten, but while the words were effaced 
the conviction was indelibly graven. All his life he 
had heard the voices in the air. While others were 
deaf he had listened to their message and understood. 
It explains much. 



64 WOODROW \MLSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Mr. Cleveland was the first Democratic President 
to be elected since the close of the Civil War, and six- 
teen years must elapse before another Democrat was 
to occupy the curule chair. The Democrats had been 
handicapped by their slavish adherence to the past, 
their exaggerated veneration for wise men long dead, 
who because of their wisdom would have adjusted 
themselves to modern conditions instead of obstinately 
resisting them. It was frequently said of the Demo- 
cratic party that like a fine old family gone to seed, all 
that was good was underground, while its descendants 
lived on tradition and withered. It was this ancestor 
worship, this clinging to outworn formulas, the mathe- 
matical splitting of constitutional hairs, that made 
the country distrust the capacity of the Democratic 
party for leadership and its inability and unwillingness 
to keep pace with social development. 

Mr. Wilson was a Democrat by birth, environment 
and conviction ; born in the South and nurtured on 
the political principles of his section he held in venera- 
tion the great Democrats who had shaped the political 
thought of the young Republic, but his days were not 
spent in adoration of the dead or his nights in silent 
meditation at the tomb. In the book which is no less 
a confession of faith than it is an aspiration, to which 
frequent reference has been made, "Congressional 
Government", he shows how clear his vision is of the 
future, he foresees the inevitable trend of political 



THE ENIGMA G5 

sociology, and Democrat though he is the fear that the 
hallowed dead may uneasily turn in Iheir coffins does 
not affright him. 

"Unquestionably, the pressing problems of the pres- 
ent moment," he writes, "regard the regulation of our 
vast systems of commerce and manufacture, the control 
of giant corporations, the restraint of monopolies, the 
perfection of fiscal arrangements, the facilitating of 
economic exchanges, and many other like national 
concerns, amongst which may possibly be numbered 
the question of marriage and divorce ; and the greatest 
of these problems do not fall within even the enlarged 
sphere of the Federal Government ; some of them can 
be embraced within its jurisdiction by no possible 
stretch of construction, and the majority of them only 
by wresting the Constitution to strange and as yet 
unimagined uses. Still there is a distinct movement in 
favor of national control of all questions of policy which 
manifestly demand uniformity of treatment and power 
of administration such as cannot be realized by the 
separate, unconcerted action of the States ; and it 
seems probable to many that, whether by constitutional 
amendment, or by still further flights of construction 
yet broader, they will at no very distant day be as- 
signed to the Federal Government." 

Later he gave evidence that he had no sympathy 
with those Democratic pundits whose over-refinement 
of scruple made them the protectors of the Constitu- 
tion at the expense of the people. In " Constitutional 



QQ WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Government " he says : " While we were once all con- 
stitutional lawyers, we are in these latter days apt to 
be very impatient of literal and dogmatic interpreta- 
tions of constitutional principle"; and again in the 
same book: "The Constitution of the United States 
is not a mere lawyer's document : it is a vehicle of life, 
and its spirit is always the spirit of the age. . . . Life 
is always your last and most authoritative critic." 

Nor did he subscribe to the sanctity which must 
attach to the unwritten law of the Constitution. Mr. 
Wilson delivered his first message to Congress in person 
instead of communicating it in writing, which was the 
custom followed by his predecessors for a hundred 
years. To the public it was an innovation, and start- 
ling, typical of the contempt Mr. Wilson had shown for 
other outworn customs ; so revolutionary almost that 
the public questioned whether he had not done some- 
thing that was in violation of the Constitution or at 
least the law ; and while some of the close students of 
history recalled that he had merely patterned after 
the first two Presidents, Mr. Wilson vouchsafed nei- 
ther explanation nor excuse. Yet the student of Mr. 
Wilson's works might have known that, secure in the 
confidence of his own power over an audience and the 
greater impression he could make, he would elect to 
speak in person rather than through the mouth of a clerk. 

Prior to the accession of George I, the King of Eng- 
land attended the meetings of the Cabinet, but George, 
being a Hanoverian, who could not speak English, and 



THE ENIGMA G7 

his Ministers not understanding German, he remained 
away, and from that day to tliis no English sovereign 
has been present at a Cabinet council. Citing this to 
show how custom creates hiw Mr. Wilson writes in 
"The State": 

"A similar example of the interesting cases with 
which men of our race establish and observe precedents 
is to be found in the practice on the part of Presidents 
of the United States sending written messages to Con- 
gress. Washington and John Adams addressed Con- 
gress in person on public affairs ; but Jefferson, the third 
President, was not an easy speaker, and preferred to 
send a written message. Subsequent Presidents fol- 
lowed his example as of course. Hence a sacred rule 
of constitutional action!" 



In New Jersey first and in Washington later, Mr. 
Wilson was an enigma to those about him, whose busi- 
ness it was to try to understand him. He eluded them. 
He presented the paradox of a man who neither hec- 
tored nor threatened, who did not use the bribe of 
patronage or the appeal to party discipline, who was 
fairly accessible and had a personal charm and mag- 
netism that was winning, and yet who had the repu- 
tation of holding himself aloof, of being too coldly 
intellectual to be human, who cared as little for com- 
panionship as he valued counsel, who had a contempt 
for politics and was the most successful politician of his 



68 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

generation. In a speech delivered at Staunton, Vir- 
ginia, in December following his election, he had said 
that "a man can keep his manners and still fight. 
The nice thrust of the sword that is delivered with a 
smile is more discouraging than the thrust that is de- 
livered with a scowl." More than one man had met 
this nice thrust delivered with a sure hand and a smile, 
but it did not lighten the victim's pain. 

Then, and to forestall the next few years, he gave 
birth to no myth ; no legend or stories clustered about 
him. In Washington so little divinity does hedge the 
President, so little removed is he from the men who 
share with him the government, that the President's 
philosophy or witticisms or satire are tossed lightly 
about ; but no one repeated what Mr. Wilson said to 
him or what he said to Mr. Wilson that brought the 
flashing reply. He remained as remote as a cloistered 
monk ; to the great mass of the American people, pay- 
ing deference to him as their secular leader, he was as 
inscrutable, as passionless almost, as the pontiff of 
their spiritual allegiance. The men brought close to him 
in an official relation transact their business and leave, 
but they carry away no atmosphere, no personal touch ; 
never is the baffling mask removed. Between him 
and the people of direct contact there is none. The 
contrast with former Presidents, freely accessible, 
shaking hands with the curious but vitally interested, 
is striking, extraordinarily so when one recalls Lincoln 
during the darkest days of the Civil War, of whom it 



THE ENIGIVLV CO 

has been said: "Literally crowds of people Iruni ;il! 
parts of tlie North saw him, exclianged a sentence or 
two, and carried home tlieir impressions." 

A strange and complex character, too subtle to be 
plumbed by little minds, too unlike the traditional 
concept of the President for the public to understand 
him any better than did the politicians, who without 
understanding had a vague feeling of disquiet that 
here was their master, that in any conflict between him 
and them they would be worsted. 

Yet the riddle might not have been so diflBcult to 
read had more study been given to the man as he re- 
vealed himself by his writings. In "Congressional 
Government " he said : 

"The best rulers are always those to whom great 
power is intrusted in such a manner as to make them 
feel that they will surely be abundantly honored and 
recompensed for a just and patriotic use of it, and to 
make them know that nothing can shield them from 
full retribution for every abuse of it." 

In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1897, 
on "Mr. Cleveland as President", he had written that 
to make a good President "a certain tough and stub- 
born fiber is necessary, which does not easily change, 
which is unelastically strong"; and one could not 
better sum up the character of Woodrow Wilson than 
to say he has a certain tough and stubborn fiber, not 
easily to be changed, and unelastically strong. In the 
same year, on August 3, addressing the Virginia State 



70 ^YOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Bar Association at Hot Springs, Virginia, he described 
in a few words the secret of successful government in 
a great crisis, such as later he was to know, when he 
said: ''Successful governments have never been con- 
ducted safely in the midst of complex and critical 
affairs except when guided by those who were respon- 
sible for carrying out and bringing to an issue great 
measures they proposed ; and the separation of the 
right to plan from the duty to execute has always led 
to blundering and inefficiency." No man has been 
more severely condemned than Mr. Wilson for refusing 
to share his powers, but long before he was intrusted 
with power, when he had only his theoretical knowledge 
to guide him, he was able to see the danger that menaced 
and the confusion that would follow if the mind that 
planned was not also the hand to execute. 

It is worth incorporating here IVIi*. Wilson's pen pic- 
ture of the great leader, which has more than an im- 
personal interest when it is recalled how in his student 
days at Johns Hopkins he prepared himself for public 
oratory by a close study of the great English parlia- 
mentarians. In "Congressional Government", in one 
of the few passages in which he gives his fancy play and 
splashes color on his palette, he tells of the power of 
oratory in Congress and says, "Men may be clever and 
engaging speakers, such as are to be found, doubtless, 
at half the bars of the country, without being equipped 
even tolerably for any of the high duties of the states- 
man ; but men can scarcely be orators without that 



THE ENIGMA 71 

force of character, llial readiness of resource, I hat 
clearness of vision, that grasp of intellect, that courage 
of conviction, that earnestness of purpose, and that 
instinct and capacity for leadership which are the eight 
horses that draw the triumphal chariot of every leader 
and ruler of free men." 

It was the bitter complaint of members of Congress 
and their satellite politicians, and to some extent it 
was shared by the country, that the new President 
was a more masterful and obstinate man than any of 
his predecessors, with perhaps the exception of Jackson, 
w^hose historical reputation they accepted without in- 
vestigation and with whom he was often compared ; but 
the comparison with Lincoln is more appropriate, as 
we shall see, although there could not be two men, in 
many things, more unlike. Lincoln was a man of in- 
finite patience, of consummate political shrewdness, 
of unyielding tenacity ; he touched emotion with the 
magic harp of speech ; he made war in a holy cause and 
brought an unwilling people to welcome sacrifice in 
the name of humanity. The parallel could not be the 
more exact. 

In some way which no one could explain but every 
one had to acknowledge, Mr. Wilson had seized power 
so completely that his own party in Congress had be- 
come merely a council to register his decrees, and the 
opposition performed no other function but that of 
muttering in futile rage. It was neither overwhelming 
ambition nor the selfish vanity of power that made 



72 WOODROW ^MLSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Mr. Wilson play this part. He brought to the Presidency 
new ideas and new methods ; the Presidency was to 
cease to be merely a superintendency and to become a 
premiership. It is amusing now as we look back, and 
it will afford much material for the future historian, 
that a great parliamentary revolution was in progress, 
and no one suspected it, and only one man knew it. 
A system that had come into existence by chance 
rather than design, that Congress after Congress had 
perpetuated, Mr. Wilson had determined to destroy, 
did begin to destroy from the first day he entered the 
White House, had struck at its foundation in the early 
months of his power, and soon was to see it crumble 
and leveled in the dust. More than one President 
had tried to do and failed what Mr. Wilson succeeded 
in accomplishing. Congress, jealous of its usurped 
powers and unwilling to yield them, resisted any at- 
tempt on the part of the President to regain his stolen 
inheritance, and the struggle ended either in the presi- 
dential surrender or a break between the President 
and his party in Congress, which was the fate of Mr. 
Cleveland, also a masterful man. Lincoln narrowly 
escaped the same fate. It was the same clash between 
a President determined to assert leadership and a Con- 
gress no less determined to keep the President subor- 
dinate. "This was an able, energetic, and truly patri- 
otic Congress," says one of Lincoln's biographers, 
"and must not be despised^for its reluctance to be 
guided by Lincoln. But it was reluctant." 



THE ENIGMA 73 

Congress went its way unsuspecting, and INIr. Wilson 
worked. Like the Congress of Lincoln's day "they 
grumbled and sneered"; just as their predecessors 
complained that before they could legislate they had 
to "ascertain the Royal pleasure", so now they de- 
nounced the man who had made them " rubber stamps ", 
who called no party leaders in conference, who showed 
no fear of Congress and treated it with little deference, 
but who sent his measures down to Congress with the 
calm assurance they would be enacted into laws. 
Every other President coming into office has been 
swamped with office seekers, with senators and rep- 
resentatives acting as office brokers for their constitu- 
ents ; and Presidents have not considered that it 
lowered their dignity to haggle over offices in return 
for promises of legislative support, while members of 
Congress have considered it part of their power to re- 
mind the President that unless they were given the offices 
they sought for their clients he might expect opposition 
when he submitted his legislative program for action. 

Mr. Wilson gave little of his time to office brokerage. 
He had avowed himself a party man ; statesmanship, 
he had recorded, was the accomplishment of party 
objects; but his imagination was too vivid and liis 
principles were too firmly established to resort to the 
cheap trick of buying strength by the sale of offices. 
The Democratic party was in power and Democrats 
were naturally to be given preferment, but the days of 
W^alpole were gone. 



CHAPTER V 

A Pledge to Humanity 
1 

The policies of an administration are broadly fore- 
shadowed by the "platform" adopted at the nominat- 
ing convention on which the candidate for the Presi- 
dency stands ; the candidate's speech of acceptance 
in reply to the formal notification of the committee 
appointed to inform him of his nomination; and his 
first official act as President, the announcement of the 
members of his Cabinet. 

A political platform has no legal validity ; it has 
neither the force of statute nor the moral obligation 
imposed upon an individual by his personal promise. 
It is the compromise of many conflicting elements, 
some of them governed by principle and others yielding 
to expediency, who are relieved from personal respon- 
sibility because their identity is lost in the mass. But 
a political platform is always to be regarded as the ex- 
pression of benevolent intention, of what the repre- 
sentatives of the people would like to do, and perhaps 
intend to do if under the heat of emotion their enthu- 
siasm has not carried them too far; and it perhaps 
more nearly typifies than any other document the be- 

74 



A PLEDGE TO HUMANITY 75 

lief men have a I the momenl of the things their fellow 
men are thinking, their desires and unsatisfied longings ; 
and puts in concrete form so as to make the strongest 
appeal the crude ideas of the multitude. 

The Democratic platform of 1912 was in harmony 
with the new thoughts that were moving men and the 
aspirations that made them see in a purified politics 
a regenerative force. The tariff, according to Demo- 
cratic belief, had been perverted from its original pur- 
pose of providing for the necessary support of the gov- 
ernment and been made an instrument of oppression 
and the means of intrenching monopoly, therefore it 
was natural for the convention to demand that taxes 
should be sufficient only for "the necessities of govern- 
ment honestly and economically administered"; that 
the trusts and their beneficiaries should be vigorously 
denounced ; that every movement in the direction of 
social reform, equality and justice, such as the income 
tax, the election of senators by the people, the publicity 
of campaign contributions, the efficient control of rail- 
ways, the improvement of agriculture and other meas- 
ures for the general benefit should be strongly approved. 

The platform of this year is noteworthy as showing 
the current of thought, how much men were thinking 
only of the things close to them, the things that were 
to bring sweetness to life and licli) to lift the burden 
— the severity of taxation, the high cost of living, the 
grasp of monopoly; and how little their thoughts 
turned to things remote from them : international rela- 



76 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

tions or the affairs of other peoples, which could not 
in any way make for their own happiness or remedy 
the injustice of which they complained. The platform 
gives perfunctory approval to a navy "sufficient to 
defend American policies ", but has no word to say of 
the army ; it favors the exemption from tolls of Amer- 
ican ships in the coastwise trade passing through the 
Panama Canal; it condemns "a policy of imperialism 
and colonial exploitation in the Philippines, or else- 
where" and favors the independence of the islands; 
and commends the action of Congress in having abro- 
gated the Russian commercial treaty because of 
Russia's discrimination against American Jews. This 
is the election manifesto of a non-militaristic, anti- 
imperialistic party of social democracy and is in 
marked contrast to former years, when foreign affairs 
were an issue and parties must take firm ground or 
risk losing votes. 

Thus in 1892 the Republican platform expressed its 
sympathy for home rule in Ireland ; in 1896 the Dem- 
ocrats championed the people of Cuba "in their heroic 
struggle for liberty and independence"; and in the 
same year the Republicans gave prominence to foreign 
policy in "planks" too long to be quoted, but which 
were vigorous and defiant. In 1900 the Democrats gave 
more space to foreign affairs than their rivals. The 
Democratic platform breathed new life into the Monroe 
Doctrine, it condemned the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty 
"as a surrender of American rights and interests not 



A PLEDGE TO HU]VL\NITY 77 

to be tolerated by the American people " ; it was equally 
severe in disapproving the *'ill concealed Republican 
alliance with England"; it "viewed with indignation 
the purpose of England to overwhelm with force the 
South African republics"; and, heartily opposing 
"militarism", avowed "this Republic has no place for 
a vast military service and conscription"; an inter- 
esting political reminiscence in view of a Democratic 
President and a Democratic Congress writing a con- 
scription act on the statute books. In the Republican 
convention of that year were fewer fire-eaters than in 
the opposing camp, although the Republicans were 
equally zealous in proclaiming their undoing faith in 
the Monroe Doctrine ; they declared their belief in the 
principle of civis Romanus sum by asserting it was 
the duty of the American Government to protect its 
citizens wherever they were placed in peril ; the for- 
eign policy of the Administration in Samoa and Hawaii 
was approved, and hope expressed for a speedy ter- 
mination of the Boer War. Further quotations are 
unnecessary, nor is it necessary minutely to inquire 
whether these platform references to foreign affairs 
were animated by principle or expediency. The pur- 
pose has been to show, and to prove, that in the past 
the relations of America with the rest of the world in- 
fluenced political thought and action and had to be 
reckoned with by the leaders of both political parties. 

The Republican platform of 1012 was not dissimilar 
to that of the Democrats in emphasizing "civil liberty 



78 WOODROW ^VILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

and the rights of men" and in pledging the party "to 
go forward with the solution of these new questions 
which social, economic and political development have 
brought into the forefront of the nation's interest"; 
but the Republicans give even less space than their 
opponents to foreign affairs. That international dis- 
putes may be settled by peaceful means and the ad- 
judication of an international court of justice is a pious 
hope; approval is given to the action of Congress in 
terminating the Russian treaty, and there is a mean- 
ingless reference to the Philippines. 

It was as a protest that the short-lived Progressive 
party came into existence that year, and its platform 
is that protest voiced: a "covenant with the people" 
to "forge a new instrument of government." Taking, 
as a matter of course, more advanced ground in social 
legislation than either of the older parties, the platform 
in a few lines dealt with only four international ques- 
tions : the immediate repeal of the Canadian Reci- 
procity Act ; freedom of the Panama Canal to American 
ships in the coastwise trade; an international agree- 
ment for the limitation of naval forces ; the protec- 
tion of the rights of American citizens. 

It will thus be seen that foreign affairs were not in 
the American picture in the year 1912, and that domes- 
tic matters monopolized attention exclusively. It 
may be added here that in the campaign that followed 
there was scarcely a reference either by the candidates 
themselves, the other party chiefs or in the press to 



A PLEDGE TO HUMANITY 7!) 

foreign policies, with the sole exception of "dollar diplo- 
macy ", a term coined by tlie Democrats to show their 
reprobation of the support given by the Republican 
Administration to American commerce and finance in 
foreign countries, but especially in China and Latin 
America. "Dollar diplomacy", however, was never 
in any sense an issue of the campaign and was too re- 
mote to the masses either to interest them or to arouse 
their passion ; it was used by the Democrats to throw 
odium on the Republicans and to strengthen the Dem- 
ocratic belief that the Republican party was a party 
of monopoly which used the government for its own 
benefit. In a word, "dollar diplomacy" was only 
another variant of tariff robbery and trust extortion. 

2 

Mr. Wilson was nominated in July, and on the 
seventh of August, in accordance with custom, he was 
notified of his nomination and delivered his speech of 
acceptance. This speech, some ten thousand words 
in length, is a reaffirmation, enlargement and interpre- 
tation of the platform. A platform, it has already been 
said, has no legal existence and is simply a moral obli- 
gation voluntarily assumed by the party, and by the 
candidate as a member of the party. The candidate's 
sjjeech of acceptance is not only a vow of fealty to his 
party and the cause of which he has been constituted 
the leader, but a solemn affirmation that he accepts 
and considers himself morallv bound to adhere to the 



80 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

principles of his party as formulated in its plat- 
form. 

Without reservation Mr. Wilson accepted the plat- 
form and showed the belief that was in him and his 
duty as he should execute it if elected. As was to have 
been expected, in the light of the platform, international 
concerns do not press upon him for discussion, seemingly 
they are not in his mind, and his whole attention is 
given to those questions of domestic policy which, to 
use his own words, make this plainly a new age. It 
was, as he saw it, a new age, an age with new thoughts, 
with men possessed of new beliefs and impatient of 
the old tricks and cunning which had so often cheated 
them. It was in that spirit he said: "We stand 
in the presence of an awakened Nation ... a Nation 
that has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals and 
neglected duties ; to the consciousness that the rank 
and file of her people find life very hard to sustain." 
What, he asked, did the platform mean.'^ It meant 
'*to show that we know what the Nation is thinking 
about, what it is most concerned about, what it wishes 
corrected, and what it desires to see attempted that is 
new and constructive and intended for its long future." 
He discussed at length the tasks ahead : the tariff and 
the trusts, laws to prevent financial confederacies, laws 
to improve labor conditions, the development of the 
American merchant mar ne ; but of the relations that 
ought to mark the intercourse of America with her neigh- 
bors on this continent and the peoples of Europe or Asia 



A PLEDGE TO HUMANITY 81 

not one word, because the things of the moment were 
those interwoven into the social fabric of his own people. 

A President no more than a Prime Minister or the 
President of the Council in France is given a free hand 
in the formation of his Cabinet. Political and geo- 
graphical considerations — it was Lincoln who said 
that if the twelve Apostles had again to be chosen the 
principle of locality would determine their selection 
— motives of expediency or motives of policy, various 
reasons, sometimes important and sometimes trivial, 
bring one man into the Cabinet and cause the rejec- 
tion of another, yet, in the main, the composition of 
the Cabinet, in America as in England and in France, 
is a fairly good index not only of the character of the 
President but also of the policy the Administration will 
follow. It is curious that long after the last sentence 
was written I should chance to run across Mr. Wilson's 
own language which I unconsciously paraphrased. 
In "Constitutional Government" he writes: 

"Self-reliant men will regard their Cabinets as execu- 
tive councils ; men less self-reliant or more prudent will 
regard them as also political councils, and will wish to 
call into them men who have earned the confidence of 
their party. The character of the Cabinet may be made 
a nice index of the theory of the presidential office, as 
well as of the President's theory of partj'^ government." 

WTien Mr. Wilson formed his Cabinet the public 
imagined that the same considerations that influenced 
his predecessors governed him ; that the Cabinet rep- 



82 WOODROW AVILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

resented political expediency, the payment of political 
debts and personal friendship, and it was diflScult for 
the public to classify the members. Mr. Wilson, 
however, had confused the public not by following 
precedent but by liberally construing his own theories. 
Being a self-reliant man he regarded his Cabinet as 
primarily an executive council ; he also saw the wisdom 
of calling to his Cabinet some men who had the con- 
fidence of the party and understood the peculiarities 
of the Congressional temperament ; but there was not 
a single member who owed his appointment to friend- 
ship or was there because the President wanted to 
have at the board a companion to whom he could turn 
as an intimate apart from the official relation. 

Taken as a whole the Cabinet was neither remark- 
able for its strength nor disgraceful for its weakness; 
it was fairly average, although it contained rather more 
than the usual number of unknown or little known men, 
but all of them were typical of what Mr. Wilson called 
the new age. That he should make Mr. Bryan Secre- 
tary of State, and thereby constitute him his chief 
official adviser and place him second in line to the suc- 
cession, was to be expected, for Mr. Bryan had a great 
following and wielded an influence in the party, at that 
time, hardly less than that of the President himself. 
That he should appoint Mr. Garrison Secretary of War 
and Mr. Daniels Secretary of the Navy was to convince 
the country that he contemplated no policy of adventure 
and looked forward to four years of harmonious rela- 



A PLEDGE TO lU'MAMTY 83 

tions with all the world. For some reason nol (|uile 
clear the Secretary of War has always been a lawyer. 
Mr. Garrison was an eminent lawyer, a man of high 
character and standing, but practically unknown out- 
side of his State except to members of his profession, 
and without political reputation ; but he was not as- 
sociated in the public mind with militarism nor was he 
the advocate of a powerful military establishment ; Mr. 
Daniels had served his political apprenticeship and had 
a wide political acquaintance, but he had held no im- 
portant place of trust and had been given no oppor- 
tunity to prove his capacity or to display his admin- 
istrative ability, and his devotion to Mr. Bryan, whose 
political and social views he shared, created a prej- 
udice against him. Mr. Bryan was a professed be- 
liever in and lover of peace ; Mr. Daniels was known 
to be equally firm in his love of peace and detestation 
of war. In the first years of his administration, when 
the country was at peace, Mr. Daniels was the victim 
of his associations and a curious belief that the navy 
was a school for social experiment, which is the one 
thing the navy is not. With the outbreak of war 
his ability and energy in bringing the navy to a war 
footing made the country reverse its former unfavor- 
able opinion and earned him its respect and admiration. 



Just as the candidate's speech of acceptance is a 
pledge so the inaugural address of the new President 



84 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

is a dedication. No President could deliver it unmoved, 
no man, no matter how base or unworthy, but must 
feel the solemnity of the simple but impressive cere- 
mony that has centered about him, the responsibility 
that has become his, the destiny he holds, the faith 
that millions of his countrymen have in him, the hopes 
and ambitions he represents. He has sworn loyally 
and well to defend and serve, and then he speaks, and 
if ever a man should say what he believes and feels 
and under the inspiration of the moment open his heart 
he must. Some Presidents have been content to deal 
in platitudes, some Presidents have spoken what men 
long remembered, and one President spoke in deathless 
words, but no President but what has revealed his 
real character. 

In his inaugural, the first of his great state papers, 
Mr. Wilson rose to lofty heights, set out the program 
it was his purpose Congress should follow, made ar- 
ticulate the things he believed, offered himself not as a 
partisan rejoicing in the victory of his party but as a 
leader to whom the cause of humanity was sacred. 
Recounting the abuses that had crept into the body 
politic and how "much fine gold has been corroded", 
telling of things that were to be accomplished, a com- 
prehensive legislative program touching not only eco- 
nomic but also social conditions, he invited all men 
to see what was in his heart and mind. "The firm 
basis of government is justice, not pity," he said. 
"This is the high enterprise of the new day: to lift 



A PLEDGE TO HUjVLVNITY 85 

everything that concerns our Hfe as a Nation to the light 
that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience 
and vision of the right . . . And yet it will be no 
cool process of mere science. The Nation has been 
deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by 
the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of Government 
too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. 
The feelings with which we face this new age of right 
and opportunity sweep across our heart strings like 
some air out of God's own presence, where justice and 
mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are 
one. . . . 

"This is not a day of triumph ; it is a day of dedica- 
tion. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the 
forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us ; men's 
lives hang in the balance ; men's hopes call upon us 
to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great 
trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest 
men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. 
God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but 
counsel and sustain me." 

In those places where it is the business of men to 
appraise and weigh and formulate a judgment of rulers 
and statesmen, in the chanceries of the world and in 
the embassies and legations of the nations great and 
small in Washington ; in newspaper offices in London 
and Paris and Tokio, undoubtedly the assize had been 
held and the verdict recorded. The character of ^Ir. 
Wilson as the world then thought it knew it, a study 



86 WOODROW WILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

of liis writings and speeches, his oft repeated declara- 
tions that of the possessions of mankind justice was the 
most precious, that wrongs which existed were to be 
righted, his seemingly utter indifference to and igno- 
rance of foreign affairs, and the composition of his 
Cabinet — a Cabinet "which abounded in pacific 
discretion" — were the hostages he gave to the world 
that under his guidance America would give no thought 
to war or aggression, that no hope of conquest would 
allure her, that in his dealings with other nations he 
would be scrupulously governed by principles of jus- 
tice and morality. The statesmen who were even then 
walking blindfold to the precipice of war must have 
felt certain America would not disturb their fatuous 
vision of peace. 



CHAPTER VI 

The First Year of Leadership 
1 

It is ironical that the fame of the man who loved 
peace rests on war. Mr. Wilson was no less a lover 
of peace than his Democratic predecessor Madison — 
and of him Mr. Wilson has written that he loved 
peace, "and was willing to secure it by any slow process 
of law or negotiation that promised to keep war at 
arm's length." Mr. Wilson contemned war and to 
him strife was abhorrent ; his thoughts were engrossed 
with domestic problems and he had selected his 
Cabinet — "which was wanting in daemonic element" 
— as the instruments to deal with them ; he attached 
so little importance to foreign affairs that he did not 
consider it necessary to appoint a competent foreign 
adviser, and yet with ironical perversity it was ordained 
that from the first day of his Presidency international 
relations should press heavily upon him. They run 
through his Administration like a scarlet thread in a 
monotonous web of dull gray. Had there been no 
war Mr. Wilson's Administration would have been 
memorable; in the first eighteen months of his 
"Premiership" he brought his party to the enactment 

87 



88 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of legislation so extraordinary that had he done nothing 
else it would have made of his Presidency an epoch in 
American politics and foreshadowed what was to be 
accomplished in the two and a half years still remain- 
ing. But his fame would have been uncertain for 
many years, his legislation would have aroused bitter 
political controversy ; and domestic policies are the 
monotonous pattern of dull gray as compared with 
the flaming thread of war. 

From his Republican predecessor Mr. Wilson in- 
herited Mexico. It is unnecessary to go into details, 
and even less necessary to discuss whether Mr. Taft, 
by the recognition of Huerta, should have cleared 
the way for Mr. Wilson. To Mr. Taft it seemed 
proper that a matter of high policy affecting the inti- 
mate relations of the United States and its most 
powerful southern neighbor ought to be determined 
by the Administration fresh with the mandate of 
the people rather than an Administration that had 
forfeited the confidence of the people. It was the 
question of recognition that confronted Mr. Wilson, 
and one week after he came to the White House, on 
March 11, 1913, he made his purpose known in a 
statement which, in view of its importance as not only 
defining his policy toward the republics of Latin 
America but also his general foreign policy, the first 
time he had made his foreign policy known, is given 
in full : 

"In view of questions which are naturally upper- 



THE FIRST YE.VR OF LEADERSHIP 89 

most in the public mind just now, the President 
issues the following statement : 

"One of the chief objects of my Administration will 
be to cultivate the friendship and deserve the con- 
fidence of our sister republics of Central and South 
America, and to promote in every proper and honor- 
able way the interests which are common to the 
peoples of the two continents. I earnestly desire the 
most cordial understanding and cooperation between 
the peoples and leaders of America and, therefore, 
deem it my duty to make this brief statement. 

"Cooperation is possible only when supported at 
every turn by the orderly processes of just govern- 
ment based upon law, not upon arbitrary or irregular 
force. We hold, as I am sure all thoughtful leaders 
of republican government everywhere hold, that just 
govermnent rests always upon the consent of the 
governed, and that there can be no freedom without 
order based upon law and upon the public conscience 
and approval. We shall look to make these principles 
the basis of mutual intercourse, respect, and helpful- 
ness between our sister republics and ourselves. We 
shall lend our influence of every kind to the realization 
of these principles in fact and practice, knowing that 
disorder, personal intrigue and defiance of constitu- 
tional rights weaken and discredit government and 
injure none so much as the people who are unfortunate 
enough to have their common life and their common 
affairs so tainted and disturbed. We can have no 



90 WOODROW WILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of 
government to advance their own personal interests or 
ambition. We are the friends of peace, but we know 
that there can be no lasting or stable peace in such 
circumstances. As friends, therefore, we shall prefer 
those who act in the interests of peace and honor, who 
protect private rights and respect the restraints of 
constitutional provision. Mutual respect seems to us 
the indispensable foundation of friendship between 
States, as between individuals. 

"The United States has nothing to seek in Central 
and South America, except the lasting interests of the 
peoples of the two continents, the security of govern- 
ments intended for the people and for no special group 
or interest, and the development of personal and trade 
relationships between the two continents which shall 
redound to the profit and advantage of both and inter- 
fere with the rights and liberties of neither. 

"From these princ pies may be read so much of the 
future policy of this government as it is necessary now 
to forecast ; and in the spirit of these principles I 
may, I hope, be permitted with as much confidence as 
earnestness to extend to the governments of all the 
republics of America the hand of genuine disinterested 
friendship and to pledge my own honor and the honor 
of my colleagues to every enterprise of peace and 
amity that a fortunate future may disclose." 

Until minor things were submerged by the universal 
chaos of the great war, Mexico was again and again 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 91 

to threaten the peace of the United States and the 
President's poHtical future. It subjected him to 
continued attack, he was accused of being cowardly 
and weak in not making war on Mexico, in having no 
poHcy, in vacillating when he ought to show firmness, 
in paltering when honor demanded a clear-cut decision. 
The Republicans eagerly seized upon his policy, or 
rather absence of all policy, as they termed it, to 
weaken his hold upon the country ; it was an issue in 
the congressional elections of 1914 and again in the 
presidential election two years later. Many members 
of his own party were restive under this criticism 
and would gladly have welcomed war with Mexico 
because of the prestige an Administration gains from a 
short and successful war — and the outcome of the 
war would not have been in doubt from the first day — 
and because of the dislike the people of the border 
States have for the Mexicans. 

Mr. Wilson knew of course this state of feeling. 
It required only such diplomacy as the State Depart- 
ment could easily furnish so to shape matters that 
Mexico would challenge the United States, which for 
its own dignity and in defense of the national honor 
must be met; and the country, irrespective of party, 
would support the President, unwillingly forced to 
chastise the insolent aggressor. Throughout, the atti- 
tude of Mexico was provocative, it afiFordcd abundant 
justification for a President seeking war and ambitious 
for military glory ; and although twice in three years 



92 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

American troops entered Mexico and blood was shed, 
after brief occupations they were withdrawn, the 
President refusing to find a cause for war in the inci- 
dents that had made invasion necessary. 

It does not have to be said that it was not cowardice 
or the fear of consequences that deterred Mr. Wilson, 
for he has given abundant evidence of his courage and 
his determination when he believes his course to be 
right, but it was in keeping with firmly founded prin- 
ciples and his code of morality to stand steadfast 
before the strong, but not to play the bully and take 
advantage of the weak. In "Division and Reunion", 
discussing the settlement of the Oregon boundary and 
the annexation of Texas, he had written : " With 
England, which was strong, we were ready to com- 
pound differences ; from Mexico, which was weak, we 
were disposed to snatch everything, conceding 
nothing." He would not make it possible for the 
historian of the future to cast that reproach upon his 
Administration. 



A week after the announcement of his Latin-Ameri- 
can policy Mr. Wilson found it necessary, on March 
18, to declare his position in regard to American co- 
operation in the financial affairs of China; the "dollar 
diplomacy" of the Taft Administration. American 
bankers had been invited by a syndicate of British, 
French, German, Russian and Japanese bankers to 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 03 

participate in a loan to China, and tlic American 
bankers, two days earlier, had called uj)c)n Secretary 
Bryan to tell him they wonld not join the syndicate 
unless expressly requested to do so by the Washing- 
ton Government. In this statement the President 
said the request desired would not be made because 
the Administration did not approve the conditions 
of the loan or the implication of responsibility. That 
responsibility "might conceivably go to the length in 
some unhappy contingency of forcible interference in 
the financial, and even the political, affairs" of China. 
That would be obnoxious to the principles upon which 
the American Government rests. Expressing the 
desire of the Government of the United States to aid 
the Chinese people in their development and to promote 
the most extended and intimate trade relationships 
with them, Mr. Wilson added: "This is the main 
material interest of its citizens in the development of 
China. Our interests are those of the open door — a 
door of friendship and mutual advantage. This is the 
only door we care to enter." 

Thus twice in the first two weeks after his in- 
auguration the man in whose thoughts domestic 
affairs occupied the chief place had been compelled by 
circumstances not of his seeking to turn from the 
consideration of matters of domestic policy to the 
field of foreign relations and had laid down the basic 
principles that would govern his conduct of external 
affairs. 



94 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

3 

Two weeks later the President was faced with a 
foreign question that had more threatening possi- 
bihties even than Mexico. The always smoldering 
antagonism between the people of the Pacific Coast 
and the Japanese had flamed anew by the introduction 
into the California legislature of a bill prohibiting 
the Japanese from owning or leasing lands. On April 
4 the Japanese Ambassador brought to the attention 
of the Secretary of State the pending legislation, 
asserting that it was discriminatory and in violation 
of treaty rights. The President appealed to the 
Governor and legislature not to draw in question the 
treaty obligations of the United States, but the appeal 
failing Secretary Bryan went to California to use his 
personal influence to prevent tlie passage of the ob- 
noxious legislation, in which he was unsuccessful. I 
shall not follow further in detail a controversy which 
dragged along into the following year and evoked 
several sharp protests from the Japanese Government. 
The President was placed in the awkward position of 
desiring scrupulously to observe treaty obligations 
and maintain international amity, but he was power- 
less to coerce California, the matter being strictly 
within the purview of the State and not subject to the 
interference or supervision of the Federal Government. 
This the State Department explained, asserting also 
that the legislation was not political, it was not to be 
assumed that it was part of a general policy or indicated 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LE.VDERSHIP 95 

unfriendliness, but was wholly economic. The corre- 
spondence is lacking in that clearness of expression 
and directness of phrase that later were to distinguish 
important connnunications nominally emanating from 
the State Department but actually written in the 
^Vhite House, and it is quite evident Mr. Bryan, with 
the assistance of his subordinates, and not the Presi- 
dent, was the author of this correspondence. 

4 

The issue raised by Japan had not diverted Mr. 
Bryan from vigorously pressing what was dearest to 
him and had the fullest support of the President. jNIr. 
Bryan was a pacifist and so was Mr. Wilson when that 
was not a term of obloquy ; Mr. Bryan had publicly 
announced shortly after his assumption of office that 
so long as he was Secretary of State the United States 
would not engage in war, and he was determined to 
remove all danger of war by the conclusion of a series 
of arbitration treaties which would substitute peaceful 
negotiation for the appeal to force. That was to be 
his policy as Minister for Foreign Affairs, and he 
believed it would establish his lasting fame. It 
peculiarly appealed to a man living in the ultramon- 
tane kingdom of idealism seeking perfection, ignorant 
of international affairs, European politics and knowl- 
edge of the world ; and he now espoused international 
arbitration with the same passionate ardor that had 
distinguished his championship of other issues largely 



9G WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

materialistic but which he was able to invest with his 
idealistic fancy. 

On April 24 Mr. Bryan announced to the press that 
the diplomatic corps had been informed of the Presi- 
dent's desire to conclude these treaties which were 
"intended to supplement the arbitration treaties now 
in existence and those that may be made hereafter." 
Believing that these treaties would make war im- 
possible, Mr. Bryan concluded his statement by 
saying: "But whether or not the proposed agreement 
accomplishes as much as is hoped for it, it is at least a 
step in the direction of universal peace, and I am 
pleased to be the agent through whom the President 
presents this proposition to the Powers represented 
here." 



With England there was a question pending, and 
while it was not settled until the following year it can 
be conveniently dealt with here. The Hay-Paunce- 
fote Treaty, by which Great Britain abrogated the 
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and relinquished to the United 
States the sole right to build and control a canal across 
the isthmus, provided that it should be open to the 
vessels of all nations on "terms of entire equality." 
The Act of Congress providing for the management 
and regulation of the canal exempted from the pay- 
ment of tolls American vessels engaged in the coast- 
wise trade, which Great Britain held was in violation 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 07 

of the treaty and a discrimination in favor of American 
shipping ; and a mild protest was lodged by the British 
Government. Mr. Taft and the Congress declined to 
accept this view, and contended that as only vessels 
under the American flag were permitted to engage in 
the coastwise trade the exemption was purely a matter 
of domestic regulation and could not in any way be 
injurious to British shipping, prohibited by law from 
the coastwise trade and therefore not brought in 
competition with American vessels. The question 
had to some extent been made political ; the British 
claim was stoutly resisted by those members of Con- 
gress and others who had no liking for England, and 
the platforms of the Democratic and Progressive 
parties contained planks approving the canal being 
made toll free to American vessels. 

Mr. Wilson ought to have regarded this as sufficient, 
and the party having spoken through its representa- 
tives he might very well have availed himself of the 
legal maxim of siare decisis and made no further 
effort to revitalize a contentious issue decently in- 
terred ; but Mr. Wilson had read the treaty and the 
law, he had formed his own opinion of the morality 
involved, even if the letter of the law sustained his 
own government, and was indisposed to permit a 
lawyer's quibble to override a moral obligation. 

Between his election in November and his in- 
auguration in the following March, when he still 
exercised only the power of a private citizen but spoke 



1)8 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

with the authority of the designated leader of his 
party and the President-elect, he made several attempts 
to induce Congress to repeal the discriminating section 
of the law, but without success. In a letter to Mr. 
William L. Marbury, of Baltimore, the President 
wrote that the exemption was a mistaken policy ; 
that it was economically unjust and in clear violation 
of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. There is, of course, 
he added, "much honest difference of opinion as to the 
last point, as there is, no doubt, as to the others, but 
it is at least debatable and if the promises we make in 
such matters are debatable, I, for one, do not care to 
debate them. I think the country would prefer to 
let no question arise as to its whole-hearted purpose 
to redeem its promises in the light of any reasonable 
construction of them rather than debate a point of 
honor." 

On March 5, 1914, Mr. Wilson went before Congress 
to urge the repeal of the exemption provision of the 
Panama Canal Act. He said in part : 

"Whatever may be our own differences of opinion 
concerning this much debated measure, its meaning 
is not debated outside of the United States. Every- 
where else the language of the treaty is given but one 
interpretation, and that interpretation precludes the 
exemption I am asking you to repeal. We consented 
to the treaty ; its language we accepted, if we did not 
originate; and we are too big, too powerful, too self- 
respecting a nation to interpret with too strained or 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LE.VDERSIlir 99 

refined a reading the words of our own promises just 
because we have power to ^ive us leave to read tlieni 
as we please. The large thing to do is the only thing 
that we can afford to do, a voluntary withdrawal 
from a position everywhere questioned and mis- 
understood. We ought to reverse our action without 
raising the question whether we were right or wrong, 
and so once more deserve our reputation for generosity 
and for the redemption of every obligation without 
quibble or hesitation. 

"I ask this of you in support of the foreign policy 
of the Administration. I shall not know how to deal 
with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer 
consequence if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging 
measure." 

Wlien Mr. Wilson was a candidate for the Presidency 
it was urged against his nomination that having almost 
no political experience he would in all probability be a 
failure as President. More than once in the first 
year of his Presidency he had confounded this proph- 
ecy, and in asking repeal he again displayed his 
political leadership. He might have pressed it on the 
merits of the case and argued in support of his con- 
tention, which would have given his opponents an 
opportunity to rebut his arguments. INIr. Wilson 
took broader ground. He put Congress in the position 
of sustaining an action impugning the national honor 
or reversing its action and protecting the honor of the 
nation ; he appealed to morality ; and to Ijring to his 



100 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

support those men who might remain unmoved by 
moral considerations urged expediency and the pubhc 
exigency. "Matters of even greater deHcacy and 
nearer consequence" had an ominous meaning, but 
required no more precise definition. Japan was 
firmly insisting upon her rights, and Japan was the 
ally of England, as Congress knew. Mexico was 
flaunting the United States, and England had great 
commercial interests in Mexico. Not willingly would 
Congress "knuckle down" to England, but the friend- 
ship of England in a time of stress was lightly bought 
at the price of the canal tolls. 

In securing repeal (Congress subsequently acted 
upon Mr. Wilson's recommendation) Mr. Wilson 
showed his power over Congress and his understand- 
ing of the temperament of his own people. Again and 
again he was to show this almost psychic comprehen- 
sion, a comprehension that so frequently apparently 
was intuition rather than ratiocination that he was 
said to have an "uncanny" power of divination. Time 
after time he did or failed to do the one thing that 
at the moment seemed fatal, which subjected him to 
the most violent criticism, to . which he remained 
indifferent, only later for these same critics grudgingly 
to admit that what he did for which they had criticized 
him, or failed to do which had provoked their denunci- 
ation, was correct. We need attribute to Mr. Wilson 
no supernormal powers, no quality not possessed by 
other men, except the rare quality of political leader- 



THE FIRST YE:VIl OF LEADERSHIP 101 

ship developed to an extraordinary degree. lie had 
the natural instinct of political leadership in the same 
way that other men have a peculiar sense of color 
or form. Mr. Wilson had said of himself that having 
grasped his facts he kept his imagination ahead of the 
facts. That is the master politician and is the secret 
of political leadership : the power to grasp facts and 
then to have the imagination to know when and how 
to present them so that they shall stir the imagination 
of the people. Abraham Lincoln had it, and it made 
him the leader in a great crisis. Pitt had it when the 
peril of the world was great. Woodrow Wilson has 
it at a time of even greater peril. 

6 

At the opening of Congress, on the second of 
December, 1913, Mr. Wilson delivered in person his 
annual address. With the exception of Mexico the 
pending controversies were not mentioned, but he 
showed what he conceived ought to be the relation of 
the United States to the rest of the world, which a few 
months later was to take form in his message urging 
the repeal of the Canal Act, by saying: 

"There is only one possible standard by which to 
determine controversies between the United States 
and other nations, and that is compounded of these 
two elements : Our o^ti honor and our obligations to 
the peace of the world. A test so compounded ought 
easily to be made to govern both the establishment of 



102 WOODROAV ^\TLSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

new treaty obligations and the interpretation of those 
already assumed." 

That baseless fabric of the dream of universal peace 
and good will and the brotherhood of nations was as 
real to Mr. Wilson as it was to European statesmen 
amusing themselves on the edge of the crater, and he 
invited all the world to share with him his phantasm. 

"The country, I am thankful to say, is at peace 
with all the world," he told his audience, "and many 
happy manifestations multiply about us of a growing 
cordiality and sense of community of interest among 
nations, foreshadowing an age of settled peace and 
good will. More and more readily each decade do 
the nations manifest the willingness to bind them- 
selves by solemn treaty to the processes of peace, the 
processes of frankness and fair concession." The 
United States had shown her sincere adherence to 
the cause of international friendship by gaining "the 
assent, in principle, of no less than thirty-one nations, 
representing four fifths of the population of the world, 
to the negotiation of treaties by which it shall be 
agreed that whenever differences of interest or policy 
arise which cannot be resolved by the ordinary pro- 
cesses of diplomacy they shall be publicly analyzed, 
discussed, and reported upon by a tribunal chosen by 
the parties before either nation determines its course 
of action." 

Referring to Mexico as the "one cloud upon our 
horizon" and declaring that "there can be no certain 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSIirP 103 

prospect of peace in America until General Iliierla has 
surrendered his usurped authority in Mexico; until 
it is understood on all hands, indeed, that such jirc- 
tended governments will not be countenanced or 
dealt with by the Government of the United States"; 
the President asserted that the United States was the 
friend of constitutional government in America ; 
*'more than that, America was its champion, because 
in no other way can neighbors, to whom America 
wishes in every way to make proof of friendship, work 
out their own development in peace and liberty." Yet 
the President contemplated no use of force against 
Mexico, nor did he purpose to change his policy, 
insistent as the public was on a more vigorous policy. 
IVIr. Wilson saw the power and prestige of Huerta 
crumbling a little every day, and the collapse he 
believed not to be far away. "We shall not, I believe, 
be obliged to alter our policy of watchful waiting." 

It will thus be seen how large a part foreign affairs 
played in the first year of his Administration and with 
what exactness Mr. Wilson charted his foreign policy. 
He had given assurances to the world and reassured 
his own people, to whom the thought of foreign adven- 
ture, aggression or military enterprise was abhorrent, 
even although there was a strong sentiment in favor 
of restoring order in Mexico and upholding the prin- 
ciple of republican government. In those twelve 
months INIr. Wilson made several speeches, from which 
only the briefest quotations can be made, whose 



104 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

keynote was duty and unselfish service. He impressed 
upon the country and the world his desire for peace 
and that the duty imposed upon the United States, 
to use a phrase he coined later, was "to serve man- 
kind", altruistically and without hope of reward. 

At Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, to the veterans of 
the Grand Army and the Confederacy, he said : 
"Come, let us be comrades and soldiers yet to serve 
our fellow men in quiet counsel, where the blare of 
trumpets is neither heard nor heeded and where the 
things are done which make blessed the nations of the 
world in peace and righteousness and love." Address- 
ing Congress on August 27, 1913, on relations with 
Mexico, he said : "We shall yet prove to the Mexican 
people that we know how to serve them without first 
thinking how we shall serve ourselves." In a speech 
in Philadelphia, October 25, 1913, he asked: "How 
are you going to assist in some small part to give the 
American people and, by example, the peoples of the 
world more liberty, more happiness, more substantial 
prosperity; and how are you going to make that 
prosperity a common heritage instead of a selfish 
possession?" At Mobile, Alabama, on October 27, 
1913, Mr. Wilson, after affirming that it was im- 
possible for any nation to be the friend of another 
except upon terms of equality and honor and that 
"it is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign 
policy of a nation in the terms of material interest", 
declared "that the United States will never again seek 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 105 

one additional foot of territory by conquest. She 
will devote herself to showing that she knows how to 
make honorable and fruitful use of the territory she 
has, and she must regard it as one of the duties of 
friendship to see that from no quarter are material 
interests made superior to human liberty and national 
opportunity." On April 30, 1914, Mr. Wilson asked 
the permission of Congress to use the armed forces 
of the country against Huerta to obtain recognition 
of the rights and dignity of the United States, saying : 
*' We seek to maintain the dignity and authority of the 
United States only because we wish always to keep our 
great influence unimpaired for the uses of liberty, 
both in the United States and wherever else it may be 
employed for the benefit of mankind." 

7 

The legislation of the first seventeen months of "Mr. 
Wilson's Presidency, from the time of his inauguration 
until Germany steeped the world in its long night of 
misery and changed the whole relation of the life of 
individuals as also of nations, must be dismissed in a 
few sentences, important as it was to the social and 
commercial future of the American people. 

The Democratic party was pledged to a revision of 
the tariff, and the policy of the party was in agreement 
with jNIt. Wilson's views and principles. Following the 
custom of American legislation in giving to important 
measures the names of the chairmen of the committees 



106 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of the two houses having jurisdiction of the subject, 
the Tariff Act of 1913 is popularly known as the 
Simmons-Underwood Law, but for the truth of his- 
tory it ought to be called the Wilson Law. It was the 
President who convened Congress without delay to 
enact the legislation, it was the President who deter- 
mined the broad principles on which the bill should 
be framed, and who had to encounter the opposition 
of Mr. Underwood; for Mr. Wilson took more 
advanced ground than Mr. Underwood in reducing 
duties on raw materials. At every stage of the 
measure Mr. Wilson was consulted, whenever there 
was any difference of opinion between Mr. Wilson 
and his party in Congress Mr. Wilson prevailed. In 
similar circumstances a British Premier would have 
led his party in person in the House of Commons, and 
upon his skill, his adroitness, his power over men and 
the state of party discipline he either would have 
carried his bill through and strengthened his hold over 
his followers or been defeated and forced out of office. 
Mr. Wilson led, but he was placed at the disadvan- 
tage of being denied the right to lead in person and hav- 
ing to exercise command at long range and through 
deputies. He could not face his party, quiet dis- 
satisfaction in his own ranks or silence opposition, but 
in all that he did he showed the genius of leadership. 
When the bill was introduced it was predicted that it 
would have very evil effects on the party, that it 
would cause a breach that would destroy the Presi- 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 107 

dent's authority; it was seriously questioned whetlior 
a majority could be found for the 1)111. Cassandra 
enjoyed her brief reign. Men with memories recalled 
the shipwreck of administrations on the tariff rock, 
and Cassandra gloomily prophesied that Mr. Wilson 
would be the victim of his own folly. 

Prophecy is an inexact science. The bill passed, 
but it did not drive a wedge into the party ranks, and 
Mr. "Wilson was made stronger by this first test of his 
power. It must be remembered that Mr. Wilson 
came into the AMiite House an unknown man almost 
in the large field of national politics and with his 
reputation as the leader of his party still to be made. 
It is not improbable, one is inclined to think it is in- 
herently probable, that Mr. W^ilson deliberately sought 
the challenge and was willing to put to the test his 
leadership so that the country should without un- 
necessary delay be given proof of it. Other Presidents 
have considered it the part of prudence not to raise an 
issue at the very beginning of their term, to conciliate, 
leisurely to study the men whose opposition later 
they may have to meet, to strengthen themselves with 
the people, to intrench themselves behind a faction 
so as to be able to count on support when the attack 
must be made. INIr. Wilson adopted no circuitous 
methods. He went directly to his objective, and with 
the passage of the bill his party and the country at 
large recognized in him a leader of remarkable quali- 
ties and the master of his party. 



108 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

In an even more remarkable degree Mr. Wilson 
displayed his political leadership when he compelled 
an unwilling Congress to reform the currency and 
banking laws. With the passage by the House of the 
tariff bill that body had nothing to occupy its attention 
until the Senate acted, and members of the House 
believed they were entitled to a well-earned holiday. 
Not so the President, who knew the advantage of 
position and how to use it. "I appeal to you with a 
deep conviction of duty," he said to Congress. "I 
believe that you share this conviction, I therefore 
appeal to you with confidence." He could focus the 
attention of the country upon the Senate, arguing the 
tariff, and the House, discussing banking reform, 
and this attention of the country has often proved a 
spur to lagging legislators. Mr. Wilson's plan worked 
admirably. Before the Senate passed the tariff bill 
the banking bill had gone through the House with a 
substantial majority, and the Senate, — it was now 
October, — tired out by its labors, appealed to the 
President for a brief respite by postponing the further 
consideration of the banking bill until the meeting of 
the regular session beginning the following December. 
Mr. Wilson refused, and again he exhibited his political 
skill. The bill, as he knew, would meet with bitter 
opposition in the Senate; the Republicans, for party 
reasons, were determined to defeat it if possible ; 
there was division among the Democrats. To post- 
pone consideration until December would be to play 



THE FIRST YEAR OF LEADERSHIP 100 

into the hands of his opponents, who would find il 
comparatively easy to block progress by bringing 
forward appropriation and other bills having the right 
of way. A stern taskmaster, Mr. "Wilson kept the 
Senate up to the collar, and it is fortunate he did so. 
Had the new fiscal system not been in operation at 
the beginning of the war it is doubtful whether the 
United States could have withstood the shock brought 
about by the derangement of the money markets of 
all the world, and it is certain that but for the new 
system the present Allies of the United States and the 
United States herself would have found the burdens 
imposed upon them in financing the war immeasurably 
increased. 

8 

For seventeen months wdth admirable fortitude, 
self-restraint, patience and the generosity of a strong 
man who has compassion for weakness and instability 
and scorns to take advantage of his strength, I\Ir. 
Wilson had resisted the temptation to make war on 
Mexico, to gain popularity by military glory, to 
break the peace of the world that he believed had 
lastingly come to the world, to permit the destruction 
of his great program of social reform by war and 
all its after consequences. He was now to be con- 
fronted with events that w'ere to require even greater 
fortitude, even greater self-restraint ; that would 
impose upon his patience a trial that at times was 



110 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

crushing, that was to test to the limit not alone his 
generosity and his justice but also his statesmanship 
and his vision ; that was to subject him to reproach 
and abuse, that disappointed his friends, perplexed 
the unprejudiced and aroused the passionate hatred 
of his opponents. No man was more maligned. 
Seldom has any man's motives been so little under- 
stood or so cruelly distorted. Silent in the face of 
criticism, uncomplaining and asking no vindication, 
admitting few persons to share his companionship, 
he worked and waited with a confidence born of 
conviction that the course he followed would not bank- 
rupt his honor or that of the nation. 



CHAPTER VII 

America at the Outbreak of War 



The war fell like a blow on Europe, although talk 
of war had been almost its daily diet for the last ten 
years, and since 1904 there had been no session of 
Parliament in which war with Germany had not been 
openly discussed and regarded as inevitable by some 
of the most influential English newspapers. British 
naval and military preparations were made always 
with the thought of Germany as the enemy. Across 
the Channel there was the same mental attitude. 
Both nations were firmly convinced there must come 
a day when they would have either to yield to Ger- 
many or fight for their existence ; nevertheless in both 
countries the pacifist element was strong. Socialists, 
Internationalists, the men who love every other coun- 
try except their own ; the agents of Germany, who 
were to be found in every rank of society ; Frenchmen 
and Englishmen, who loudly proclaimed their loyalty 
but were abetting Germany ; Ministers of the Crown 
in England and members of the Government in France, 
— some of them in the highest places, — either allowed 

111 



112 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

themselves to be blinded or deliberately sought to be- 
tray their country for the advantage of Germany. 

The same social forces that brought Mr. Wilson into 
power did a few years earlier bring Mr. Asquith into 
power. In England as in America there had been a 
revolt of the masses against the classes ; just as in 
America the people were resentful of the privileges of 
plutocracy, of class legislation, of favors extended to a 
select few, so in England the laboring man, the artisan, 
the great lower middle class were demanding their 
"rights", and conscious of their power, determined to 
exert it. Mr. Asquith's supporters were not only 
"Liberals" in the party sense, but radicals, social re- 
formers, advanced thinkers ; and to them force or re- 
straint was intolerable. In economics they were free 
traders, because, as they believed in their delusion, 
free trade broke down the barriers between nations, 
and internationalism was one of the cardinal articles 
of their faith. They passionately advocated dis- 
armament, because great navies and huge standing 
armies were a menace and a sure invitation to war, 
and to them war was anathema. There was more 
than a little leaven of idealism in all this ; they were 
as selfish and grasping as the professional philanthro- 
pist. If instead of the people being taxed to build bat- 
tleships and maintain armies their millions were used 
for the benefit of the people, for old-age pensions, work- 
ingman's insurance and other social reforms that were 
praiseworthy, and some of the fantastic schemes that 



AMERICA AT THE Ol'TBREAK OF WAR 113 

Utopia delights in, the people would be the gainers ; 
especially if the rich were to be made to bear more 
than their equitable burden of taxation. 

Holding his commission under these terms, Mr. 
Asquith was justified in enacting his program of 
social legislation. He represented for the time being 
the majority ; that majority had demanded certain 
changes in the social fabric, and the reforms that en- 
ticed them he believed in. It was therefore not only 
his duty but his desire so to shape the foreign policy 
of his Administration as to remove the danger of war 
with Germany, and as an earnest of good faith to re- 
duce to the lowest limits consistent with the national 
safety military expenditures. The foreign policy of 
his Administration, for which he was responsible but 
which w^as carried out through his Foreign Secretary, 
Sir Edward Grey, is a sorry story of that curse of 
European diplomacy, treaty making in the dark. 
There were the usual secret agreements, the exchange 
of "confidential" letters, "private" conversations, 
the customary network of intrigue and deceit binding 
nations whose people were kept in ignorance and who, 
when they asked inconvenient questions, were told it 
would be unpatriotic to embarrass the government 
merely to have their idle curiosity satisfied. The 
whole story has since been told; it is now history 
and the world knows it, but it reflects little credit 
upon the men on whom responsibility rests. 

Almost to the very day of war this policy of beguil- 



114 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

ing the people was followed, and scarcely a week passed 
but what members of the Cabinet told English au- 
diences they had nothing to fear. A few months be- 
fore the war, Mr. Lloyd George, then the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, said: "This is the most favorable 
moment in twenty years to overhaul our expenditures 
on armaments." About the same time Lord Hal- 
dane, the Lord Chancellor, the great authority in the 
Cabinet on Germany, who had been sent by the Prime 
Minister to Germany to see if an understanding could 
not be reached so as to remove the danger of war 
which every one feared, said: "Europe was an armed 
camp, but an armed camp in which the indications 
were that there was a far greater prospect of peace 
than ever there was before." 

That was the picture within a few months of the 
declaration of war, but after the war had been in prog- 
ress two months, for the first time the truth was 
told. Speaking at Cardiff, on October 2, 1914, Mr. 
Asquith admitted that for two years at least he had 
known that Germany was preparing to make her 
war of conquest. The German Government, in 1912, 
he said, "asked us — to put it quite plainly — they 
asked us for a free hand so far as we were concerned 
if, and when, they selected their opportunity, to over- 
bear and dominate the European world." 



AMERICA AT THE OL'TBUEAK OF WAR 115 

2 

Tims if the war came as a sla^<,^MMng and uiioxpoclcd 
blow to the English people daily fed on the lliought of 
war, discussed by tlieir politicians and made an issue 
in party politics, Americans, to whom the tliouglil of 
war was very remote, who knew of the politics of 
Europe only as they gleaned them from their news- 
papers, were amazed at the outbreak of the war. 
It was incredible. Nowhere was war so detested 
as in the United States ; no people so profoundly 
believed that peace ruled the world as did Americans. 
A few men there were, it is true, wiser, a few students 
of European politics who saw as clearly as the elect 
in England or France and who were not deceived by 
the sophisms of Ministers or the fable of the lion and 
the lamb ; but to the great majority of Americans the 
war that had so often been talked about and now had 
come was unbelievable. 

One of Mr. Wilson's biographers, a friend and ad- 
mirer, writing in 1916, when the United States was 
neutral and the policy of the President was misunder- 
stood and it seemed necessary that his adherents should 
interpret and defend it, offers this inadequate expla- 
nation : 

" The outbreak of the European war was a most un- 
toward event for President Wilson. His thoughts and 
his plans had been concerned with the domestic prob- 
lems of our politics and his Cabinet had been chosen 
with a view to such occupations. The country was 



116 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

deeply in arrears as regards measures for adjusting 
law and administration to existing business and social 
needs, and he was in the first stages of a program of 
reform quite enough to consume a presidential term, 
when the explosion took place that shook the world. 
Apparently nothing could have been more inoppor- 
tune." 

"Inopportune!" What a perfect sense of propor- 
tion. Had Mr. Wilson's biographer been living at 
the time of the Flood he would probably have de- 
scribed it as "annoying" and interfering with Mrs. 
Noah's spring cleaning. 

The truth is no head of a State was ever placed in a 
more delicate position or one requiring greater tact, 
skill and statesmanship than was Mr. Wilson at the 
outbreak of the war. That his program of domestic 
reform was in all probability wrecked (subsequent 
legislation showed that he was able to salvage at least 
a portion) was a consequence less serious than the 
danger of division and disunion among his own people, 
which was of all dangers the greatest, and immediately 
forced itself upon Mr. Wilson. In all other countries 
the cleavage was distinct ; the people were either pro- 
Ally or pro-German; they hoped either for the su- 
premacy of Allied arras or the victory of Germany ; 
they either sympathized with democracy and con- 
stitutional liberty, as typified by Great Britain and 
France, or they believed in autocracy and the rule 
of force represented by Germany ; but in America, in 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 117 

August, 1914, this solidarity of two opposing camps 
did not exist. 

Speaking broadlj' America was divided not into two 
but four camps : One, Americans who because of 
descent, affihations, admiration for Enghsli institu- 
tions and her poHtical system, her hterature and her 
contribution to the science of jurisprudence, on whicli 
American Law is founded, were the friends of Eng- 
land, her champions loyal and steadfast from the 
first day of the war; to them the war was a conflict 
between two opposing schools of civilization, and 
they hoped for the triumph of the men of their own 
blood and thought. 

Two, Americans who because of the false teachings 
of history, who from their cliildhood had been brought 
up to believe that England was the bully among 
nations, in whom old grudges still rankled or who had 
personal scores to pay off against individual English- 
men, were anti-English and the supporters of Germany. 

Three, Americans who were indifferent, whose at- 
titude can be summed up in the pithy sentence, "the 
war is none of our business", and to whom the war 
offered great business opportunities. To these Ameri- 
cans most distinctly the war was none of their busi- 
ness. The political principle that had been the 
strength of America was now to be its weakness. 
What had enabled America to develop as no other 
nation and had created an intense spirit of confidence 
and strength in Americans was their detachment 



118 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

from European politics. The Seven Years' War, one 
of the most momentous periods in history, which was 
fought not only in Europe but in Asia and Africa, 
which was to gain for England at the cost of France, 
America as well as India, was to the English colonists 
in America, President Wilson tells us, "only the 
French and Indian War. Their own continent was 
the seat of their thought." This extreme self-concen- 
tration, this centering of their thoughts on their own 
continent, has always distinguished Americans ; it is 
as marked in the American temperament to-day as it 
was one hundred and fifty years ago, and while it has 
given the American the pride he has in country, it has 
produced localism and a certain inability to appraise 
values. To those Americans unashamed because they 
were indifferent Europe was at war, since, as their 
histories taught them, war was the natural condition 
of European nations, this war was no different from 
any other; the great moral principle escaped them, 
nor did they understand that it was a war not to save 
dynasties or to gratify ambition but to save democracy 
from perishing off the face of the earth. It therefore 
accorded with their traditions and political teachings 
to remain unmoved spectators of the "quarrel" and 
continue to go about their own affairs. We shall see 
later why they were blind and that in part, at least, 
they are not to be held to blame. 

Four, Germans, the so-called German-Americans, 
the great majority of whom while pretending to be 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 11!) 

loyal Americans and owing no allegiance to Germany 
were at heart German and devoted to her interests ; 
the Irish, Austrians, Turks and other subjects of the 
Central Powers. These elements constituted a group 
bitterly and openly hostile to England. 

It is impossible of course to give exact figures when 
no precise data are available and estimates must be 
guesswork, but with such information as we have, 
based on census statistics of nativity and immigra- 
tion, the speeches and votes of members of Congress, 
newspaper utterances, known political and social con- 
ditions in various parts of the country, and other tests, 
crude but fairly accurate, it is approximately correct 
that the Americans in group one outnumbered those 
in group two ; if to group two is added the third group, 
the total would be heavily in excess of the first group ; 
and the combined second, third and fourth groups 
give a preponderant majority over group one. In 
other words, at the outbreak of the war the friends 
of England in America were submerged by lukewarm 
opponents, the indifferent and the bitterly hostile. 
There were in addition certain cross currents which 
must enter into the calculation. The fine of division, 
curiously enough, was geographical as well as social 
and intellectual, modified again by other currents. In 
the large cities, notably in the East, due to intermar- 
riage and social intercourse, the leisure class and the 
wealthy supported England, and joined with them were 
the great bankers and important business men having 



120 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

intimate relations with English banks and firms; 
but this influence was offset to a certain extent by 
German , bankers and merchants, to whom Berlin 
and not London was the center of their thoughts. 
Lawyers, doctors, clergymen, college professors, the 
"intellectuals", in short, were, in the mass, pro- 
English, because they did their own thinking and had 
quickly decided that Germany was the aggressor; 
moreover, the spiritual and intellectual bond linked 
them to England, while Germany to them was alien. 
In this class, however, the ranks were thinned by 
those scientists, scholars, chemists and doctors who 
had studied in Germany and had brought back with 
them an exaggerated idea of German learning and 
efficiency, who had been in the habit of looking to Ger- 
many rather than to England or France for discovery 
and pure knowledge, and to whom the German was 
still the good-natured, moral and honest companion of 
his youth. American colleges had many German pro- 
fessors, who invited their students to share with them 
their admiration for German Kultur and created a 
German atmosphere; English members of the faculty 
were rare, and such as there were taught their subject 
but made no attempt to turn their lecture halls into 
centers of propaganda. 

Thousands of Jews every year were driven forth 
from Russia to find a haven with their coreligionists 
in the congested districts of the large cities, there to 
become naturalized and often to be a determining 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 121 

factor in an election. Willi the memory of their 
wrongs tlie American Jew, from the peddler who 
slowly spelled his way through his Yiddish news- 
paper, to the great banker, forgot what England had 
done for his race and remembered only the indignities 
that Russia had put upon him, the massacres her of- 
ficials had instigated, the misery and degradation that 
had been his, and he prayed that Russia might be de- 
feated and the faces of her rulers ground in the dust ; 
the influence of American Jewry, social, political and 
financial, while not pro-German was, because of 
Russia, indirectly anti-English. In the West, on the 
Pacific Coast especially, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance 
had always been unpopular and was regarded as a 
menace to America, and that Alliance was to be one 
of the reasons why the people of the Far West were 
indifferent to a war that would still further increase 
the prestige of Japan and make her more than ever to 
be feared ; and they were able easily to persuade them- 
selves Allied success threatened their own security and 
self-interest would be served by a German victory. 

These were the passions war brought to America. 
As she fought the battle of the spirit and watched men 
dying for their salvation America was to find her soul, 
and Mr. Wilson was to lead his people to righteousness. 



And what of Mr. Wilson ? 

Had the war taken place a few years earlier, when 



122 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Mr. Wilson was holding a chair at one of the uni- 
versities, no one can doubt that the day Germany 
violated the neutrality of Belgium he would have 
taken his place with the men of his own class and, 
similar to the great majority of the "intellectuals", his 
voice and his pen would have been one of the power- 
ful influences for right. His descent, his training, his 
sympathies, his sense of morality and justice make this 
certain. Mr. Wilson was not the political historian 
of Europe, nor had he more than the average well- 
educated man's knowledge of the great political move- 
ments of Europe in the past or that close familiarity 
with contemporary diplomacy and the hidden forces 
of international politics that is part of the training 
of every European statesman who aspires to high 
office — his work had been in other directions — but 
as the student of the social and governmental systems 
of Europe, and of England especially, his sympathies 
must naturally align him with men of his own race 
who had been the champions of liberty and political 
freedom. His admiration for the political genius of 
England had been frequently expressed ; it was the 
English rather than the German system of education 
that he believed was best suited for America. He had 
spent numerous holidays in England, enjoying the 
peaceful countryside on bicycle or on foot; English- 
men were his friends and he understood them ; he not 
only spoke their language but he thought as they 
did ; but of Germans he had only the superficial 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 12IJ 

knowledge that is the common property of all men 
of the world. 

In 1914 Mr. Wilson was not a private person to give 
free rein to his sj'mpathies, to be swayed by his emo- 
tions or to yield to the impulse of championing a cause 
that did not touch the interests of his own country. 
Mr. Wilson was the President of the United States, 
and as such he was charged with a solemn duty. -^ 

In his short life of the President published in 1916, 
Professor Henry Jones Ford of Princeton University, 
an old friend and associate, compares ]Mr. Wilson's 
course with that of Washington in 1793, who was 
termed perfidious, cowardly and ungrateful because he 
remained neutral instead of going to the assistance of 
France. Hamilton defended Washington's policy, and 
Ford quotes Hamilton: "Rulers are only trustees for 
the happiness and interest of their nation, and cannot, 
consistently with their trust, follow the suggestions 
of kindness and humanity towards others, to the 
prejudice of their constituents." A selfish doctrine, it 
may be said, but it is the doctrine that all nations 
have learned. Half a century later an English states- 
man, in less stilted language, subscribed to the Hamil- 
tonian doctrine. "The Foreign Secretary of this 
country". Lord John Russell said in the course of the 
"Don Pacifico" debate of 1850, "is the Minister not 
of France, nor of Russia, nor of any other foreign 
country, but of Great Britain alone, and he has to 
think first and foremost of her interests." 



124 AYOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

"If President Wilson had acted in a spirit of knight 
errantry," Professor Ford writes, "he might have 
avoided the reproaches now heaped upon him by 
those who view the case through the medium of their 
sympathies. What he did do was to make the welfare 
of his own country the guide of his actions. . . . The 
duties of trusteeship, whether public or private, are 
confined to actual and definite obligations. All the 
objections raised against Wilson's course apply quite 
as fully to Washington's course, and the principle in- 
volved in both cases is the same — the principle of 
trusteeship. . . . That a larger, more generous view 
of duty might have been taken is a position that is 
logically tenable. But if the principle of trusteeship, 
as adopted by Washington and formulated by Hamil- 
ton, is accepted as sound, then the course pursued by 
Wilson must be approved, since its particulars, when 
examined from this point of view, show conformity to 
that principle." 

This is a somewhat labored defense, frankly offered 
as a defense at a time when it seemed imperative to 
the friends of Mr. Wilson, for his own fame and to 
justify their loyalty and trust, to defend him and 
explain his policy ; and of this defense and explana- 
tion there was necessity, for Mr. Wilson was under- 
stood neither at home nor abroad. His friends, with 
the best intentions, did not help him, and he, too little 
caring for fleeting judgment, was content to wait for 
the matured and reasoned verdict of history. It is 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 125 

unfortunate that Doctor Ford while stressing as the 
animating motive of Mr. Wilson's policy the obliga- 
tions of a trustee, entirely neglects the higher motives 
that influenced him. 

It is true that his duty as revealed to him was clear 
and that his first and chief obligation was to his own 
country : to keep America at peace both at home 
and abroad. The interests of America had been con- 
fided to his keeping ; he could best serve those interests 
by peace. It was the same principle that had gov- 
erned him in his relations with Mexico, that had 
brought him bitter censure, that had made his op- 
ponents accuse him of being such a coward lover of 
peace that he would willingly barter the honor of the 
nation and remain unmoved by the contempt of the 
world. To some men there are things more terrible 
than war, and to them war is so foul a thing they will 
do everything in honor to avoid it. Mr. Wilson would 
go to war, but not until there was no alternative. 

His position was that of a trustee who must guard 
the interests of his ward, but who must not, either in 
law or ethics, do any action that, morally right, may 
be attended by disastrous consequences. It was the 
policy of caution, it was the policy of a statesman who 
was not timid but was carefully feeling his ground, 
who knew the diflBculties he had to contend with and 
the danger from any incautious step ; but what one 
likes to know is that while his countrymen were swayed 
by sympathy, prejudice or material consideration. 



126 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

from the very first day of the war Mr. Wilson saw 
the moral issues involved, saw that the United. States 
was placed in a position of exceptional moral respon- 
sibility, and that to the United States had been given 
an opportunity such as had rarely been afforded to a 
nation to serve morality and mankind. 

Mr. Wilson's belief was that even if his people 
were united — which they were not — and sanctioned 
war against Germany — which they did not ; and to 
have made war on England was unthinkable — what- 
ever temporary advantage it might have been to 
England and her Allies, ultimately they, and not they 
alone but all civilization, would gain by the United 
States maintaining her neutrality. In August, 1914, 
the world was to learn the meaning of modern war, 
of which it then was in complete ignorance; to see- 
the complex structure of society disorganized and 
the complicated industrial machinery of peace trans- 
formed into the mechanism of war; to see the whole 
man power of nations mobilized to fight in the field 
or to make it possible for armies to fight. No nation 
then appreciated its strength ; of what it was capable ; 
how much it could endure ; its capacity to meet the 
demands suddenly laid upon it. The potential power 
of the United States the world knew as well as Amer- 
icans, but at that moment the thing that counted 
was armies whose men were counted by the million; 
not raw recruits hastily whipped together, but trained 
soldiers with experienced oflficers, equipped with guns 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 127 

and all the other inventions of science for slaughter, 
all those things that Germany had piled up for forty 
years and of which England and France had such a 
beggarly store and the United States was poverty- 
stricken. Without an army and with no means of 
creating one until the emergency was over — for the 
very magnitude of the conflict encouraged the general 
belief that the war must be of short duration because 
no nation could stand for more than a few months the 
physical or financial strain — of what use could be 
the United States? 

The material power of the United States could not 
be exerted, but its moral influence could be made a 
force incapable of resistance. The time must come, 
Mr. Wilson thought, by persuasive counsel it might 
even be accelerated, when neither side would dare to 
make the first overture for peace, but both sides would 
gladly welcome the good oflBces of a disinterested 
friend; and what nation was better fitted for that 
role than the United States ? In Europe there was no 
nation, because they were all linked to the belligerents 
by dynastic or political ties, but the United States, 
aloof from the politics of Europe, allied with no nation 
but the friend of all, seeking neither territorial gains 
nor political prestige, could, without risking suspicion 
or exciting jealousy, at the opportune moment, play 
the part of the mediator, and by appeal and moder- 
ation be the means of restoring peace. 

Still another consideration had great weight with 



128 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Mr. Wilson. Germany began the war by violating a 
treaty and with shameless cynicism publicly an- 
nounced that when the law of nations came into con- 
flict with the law of necessity international law no 
longer existed; and this was quickly followed by 
other infractions of public law. The irresolution and 
hesitating policy of the British Government in block- 
ading Germany without formally declaring a blockade, 
its almost apologetic attitude for exercising the in- 
dubitable legal right of visit and search, the extension 
of the list of absolute contraband to meet modern 
conditions timidly done instead of being boldly pro- 
claimed, the weakness and vacillation of the Foreign 
Office produced in the public mind the impression 
that the rights of small nations were being ruthlessly 
trampled upon, that the paper blockades and the Milan 
decrees and the Orders in Council of the Napoleonic 
wars, which so bitterly aroused American animosity, 
were being revived, that the sanctions of public law 
and public morality were cast aside, that England no 
less than Germany was determined to substitute might 
for right, and the world was in danger of reverting to 
barbarism. 

It was not easy for the public to understand the 
merits of the issues raised or to pronounce judgment 
on the legality of questions that divided bench and 
bar. The partisans of both nations filled the news- 
papers with their arguments, and Germany, with more 
adroitness than her opponent, muddied the waters by 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR I'-Zi) 

academic discussion of international law that enlight- 
ened no one but only brought further confusion to a 
public already puzzled and uncertain whether, in the 
convenient formula, there was not "right on both 
sides." Disputable points of international law the 
common man did not attempt to pass upon, but he 
believed he was competent to decide the broad prin- 
ciple of justice, and to him it seemed neither just nor 
in keeping with strict neutrality that England could 
buy whatever she wanted in the United States while 
to Germany that privilege — to many persons it was a 
right rather than a privilege — was denied. Strange as 
it may seem now, yet it is nevertheless true that at 
that time this advantage held by England produced a 
certain reaction in favor of Germany and caused it to 
be believed — especially among the unthinking, the 
opponents of England and the partisans of Ger- 
many — that the Administration was unduly well 
disposed toward England, that it was showing favor- 
itism instead of being impartial, and the law was con- 
strued to the detriment of Germany. England's 
command of the sea made it appear as if Germany, 
and not England and France and poor tortured Bel- 
gium, was the under dog, and the American love of 
fair play and sympathy for the under dog fighting 
against terrific odds and handicapped by the sham 
neutrality of America created for Germany a sympa- 
thy which Ajnericans now recognize was misplaced 
and which they regret. Germany with some shrewd- 



130 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

ness played on cupidity by insidiously accusing Eng- 
land of preventing Americans from making the profits 
that were always legitimate in war. Germany, her 
agents let it be known, was anxious to buy at extrav- 
agant prices cotton, wheat, copper, practically every- 
thing that America had to sell, but England selfishly 
stood in the way, in her hatred of Germany caring 
nothing for the loss she brought to America or the 
wealth of which she deprived her. 

To Mr. Wilson, therefore, it seemed that circum- 
stances imposed upon him the duty of being the 
champion and guardian of neutrality, and by defend- 
ing public law and protecting public morality he 
would render to all the world, to belligerents no less 
than neutrals, an inestimable service, that would be 
as valuable in a time of stress as it would be in the 
future when peace again reigned. The United States 
was the most powerful of all the neutrals; the one 
nation whose friendship, even at that time, all the 
belligerents were anxious to retain ; whose material 
resources, if thrown into the struggle, might prove 
the decisive factor ; whose influence no nation could 
affect to treat with contempt ; whose voice must be 
listened to when smaller nations could with safety be 
ignored. 

It was an error of judgment ; frankly to be so re- 
corded, perhaps the sole instance when Mr. Wilson's 
judgment was in error. Looking back now it is easy 
enough to see, and still easier for the critic who plays 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 131 

with his facts to say, that Mr. Wilson couhl have \)vcn 
of groalcr service to mankind had he turned tlie Ihouglit 
of his countrymen toward war instead of trying to 
keep before them the thought of peace; had he al the 
first opportunity yielded to the pressure j)ut upon 
him, and had he done in 1915, when Germany gave 
abundant cause for war, what he was to do two years 
later; had he, in short, begun to arm with the first 
day of conflict. It is the easy thing to say, and also 
the unworthy thing. There is no doubt Mr. Wilson 
could have carried the country into war, for the power 
of the President in foreign affairs is too great to be 
\\'ithstood, and the traditions of the Presidency make 
him the arbiter of war or peace, but he would have 
driven an unwilling country into war instead of leading 
a country resolved on war as the only escape from the 
surrender of honor and the confession of cowardice ; 
he would have made war with an army and not a 
nation ; and war is no longer a combat of armies but 
a conflict of nations and the massing of the spiritual 
strength of peoples. It would have been a war against 
Germany and a battle at home, not the actual clash 
of arms, for revolt was not to be feared, but a long, 
dra\Mi-out struggle with those who did not believe 
America was justified in going to war and who would 
have hampered and obstructed the prosecution of the 
war. Actually guilty of treason they might not have 
been, but Mr. Wilson would have been embarrassed as 
Lincoln was, whose task was made more difficult by 



132 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the friends of the South in the North; by poHtical 
opponents secretly in sympathy with the enemy who 
would gladly have seen the North accept an incon- 
clusive peace and agree to a compromise so that the 
Confederacy might be spared the humiliation of un- 
conditional surrender and save some vestige at least 
of the institution to which she was wedded. 

It is easy now to say that Mr. Wilson, no matter 
how splendid his motives, was deficient in that one 
quality without which no man can be a great states- 
man. A statesman must have imagination ; it is 
vision that raises him above the common level ; and 
Mr. Wilson, incapable of foretelling the future, was 
no greater than the ordinary man. But had he done 
so, had he been able in 1915 to see what 1917 was to 
bring, he would have been the towering genius of his 
time, a superman. To no European ruler or states- 
man or general, not even to the criminal who pro- 
voked the war or those about him, was knowledge 
vouchsafed of the future. If Mr. Wilson was ignorant, 
so were they, and their means of knowing was far 
greater than his. It was the same reproach that 
Lincoln had to bear, whose vision was so limited that 
he was content to call for seventy-five thousand volun- 
teers to serve three months to subdue a rebellion that 
was crushed only at the end of four years and taxed 
the full resources of the North. To-day no one ac- 
cuses Lincoln of being a pacifist or not being a seer. 
He has passed into immortality ; his error of judgment 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 133 

has long been forgotten. What the historian of the 
future will see is that Mr. Wilson knew the temper of 
his people, knew that they were not ready to be led 
to war, knew that the time to make them sanction 
war had not yet come. 

4 

It was in these circumstances that Mr. Wilson on 
August 18, 1914, issued his much criticized exhorta- 
tion to his fellow countrymen to be neutral in thought 
as well as in name, and in his address put in form the 
motives which have been analyzed. Americans, the 
President wrote, were bound in honor and affection to 
think first of America and her interests, as any diver- 
sions among them "would be fatal to our peace of 
mind, and might seriously stand in the way of the 
proper performance of our duty as the one great nation 
at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a 
part of impartial mediation, and speak the counsels 
of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but 
as a friend. 

"The United States must be neutral in fact as well 
as in name during these days that are to try men's 
souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in 
action ; must put a curb upon our sentiments as well 
as upon every transaction that might be construed as 
a preference of one party to the struggle before another. 

"My thought is of America. I am speaking, I 
feel sure, the earnest wish and purpose of every 



134 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

thoughtful American, that this great country of ours, 
which is, of course, the first in our thoughts and in 
our hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar 
trial a nation fit beyond others to exliibit the fine poise 
of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of self-control, 
the eflSciency of dispassionate action ; a nation that 
neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed 
in her own counsels, and which keeps herself fit and 
free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly 
serviceable for the peace of the world. 

"Shall we not resolve to put upon ourselves the 
restraint which will bring to our people the happiness 
and the great and lasting influence for peace we covet 
for them?" 

Few things Mr. Wilson had done unloosed such a 
furious storm. To those persons who were the pas- 
sionate champions of the Allied cause, to whom in the 
first two weeks of the war the German had revealed 
himself the beast he is, to whom the meaning of the 
war had never been obscured, who knew that this was 
a death struggle of civilization against savagery, Mr. 
Wilson's words of quiet counsel and his appeal to self- 
ish interest was a bribe to sell their honor for a mess 
of rotten pottage. Bitterly they resented it and deeply 
they felt their humiliation. America, too intent upon 
her own ungenerous comfort, thinking only of her own 
sordid gain, was eternally disgraced. 

Indignation still seething was increased when Mr. 
Wilson sent to the German Emperor a benevolent 



MIERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 135 

expression of neutrality, and to an ofiicial Belgian tklc- 
gation expressed the pious hope that the war would 
soon be over, but sedulously refrained from any ex- 
pression that would reveal his sympathies. The 
German Emperor early began his monstrous eam- 
paign of lies when he cabled to the President that the 
British and French armies were using dum-dum 
bullets in violation of the Hague Convention. On 
September 16 Mr. Wilson's reply was made public. 
*'I am honored," he wrote, "that you should have 
turned to me for an impartial judgment as the repre- 
sentative of a people truly disinterested as respects 
the present war and truly desirous of knowing and 
accepting the truth. . . . Presently, I pray God very 
soon, this war will be over. The day of accounting 
will then come when, I take it for granted, the nations 
of Europe will assemble to determine a settlement." 
The President felt sure that "where wrongs have 
been committed their consequences and the relative 
responsibility involved will be assessed," and he held 
it would be unwise and inconsistent with neutrality 
for a single Government to express a final judgment. 
"I feel sure that such a reservation of judgment until 
the end of the war, when all its events and circum- 
stances can be seen in their entirety and in their true 
relation, will commend itself to you as a true expres- 
sion of sincere neutrality." 

On the same day, to a Belgian Commission, sent 
by their Government to bring to the notice of the 



136 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

American Government the atrocities and the violations 
of the laws of war of which Germany had been guilty, 
Mr. Wilson used practically the same language. Ex- 
pressing his pleasure at receiving the representatives 
of a people for whom the people of the United States 
had strong friendship and admiration, declaring that 
the American people "love justice, seek the true paths 
of progress, and have a passionate regard for the rights 
of humanity", Mr. Wilson gave to the men pleading 
the cause of a martyred country, who had put into his 
hands the report of a judicial committee telling of 
women ravished and men mutilated and cities burned 
to the ground, only the cold comfort of patience; he 
could offer them nothing warmer than the same pious 
hope expressed to the German Emperor that the war 
would soon be over and bring its day of reckoning. He 
said : 

"Presently, I pray God very soon, this war will be 
over. The day of accounting will then come, when, 
I take it for granted, the nations of Europe will as- 
semble to determine a settlement. Where wrongs 
have been committed their consequences and the rel- 
ative responsibility involved will be assessed. . . . 

"It would be unwise, it would be premature for a 
single Government, however fortunately separated 
from the present struggle, it would be inconsistent 
with the neutral position of any nation, which like 
this has no part in the contest, to form or express a 
final judgment." 



AMERICA AT THE 01 1 BREAK OF WAR 137 

"While the attack was still l)cMn<j furiously delivered 
Mr. Wilson was to receive supj)ort from an unexpected 
quarter. Second only to Mr. Wilson in the strength 
of his following, Mr. Roosevelt, despite his defeat, 
still remained the idol of his adherents, who looked to 
him not only for political guidance but moral inspi- 
ration. No two men were more unlike; it would be 
impossible, one would say, for them ever to think alike 
or to see eye to eye, yet perhaps for the first and last 
time in their lives they were in harmony ; and Mr. 
Roosevelt's approval of the President's course was 
undoubtedly a potent influence in quieting the demand 
for war and convincing the country of the wisdom of 
INIr. Wilson's policy in maintaining neutrality. It 
was the more surprising because the public associated 
IMr. Roosevelt with prompt and vigorous action, to 
whom temporizing was hateful ; who was not afraid 
to use force when weakness was folly ; whose love of 
justice was so compelling that he dare not compromise 
with wrong; whose instinctive sense of morality 
made him alw^ays do what was right. Thousands of 
Americans, hundreds of thousands in the aggregate, 
were with open minds waiting for a sign, waiting to 
have some one with suflScient authority and in whom 
they had confidence show them their duty ; whether 
a duty higher than personal sympathy demanded 
that the American people should hold the scales of 
judgment level between the wrongdoer and his victim, 
or the Germans were to be encouraged to believe 



138 WOODROW ^MLSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

that "Americans were as neutral between right and 
wrong as Pontius." Mr. Roosevelt was to lead them. 

Mr. Wilson had received the Belgian Commission on 
September 16, 1914, and dispassionately dismissed 
them. One week later, while the press of the country 
was bitterly denouncing or vehemently defending Mr. 
Wilson, an article by Mr. Roosevelt entitled "The 
World War; Its Tragedies and Its Lessons" was pub- 
lished in the New York Outlook. Mr. Wilson had 
carefully abstained from showing any partiality and 
had steered the safe course of judicial impassivity ; 
Mr. Roosevelt championed Germany, he defended 
the supreme law of necessity, flatly declared that it 
was not the business of the United States to interfere 
in the afiFairs of Belgium, and that the highest interests 
of the United States required the maintenance of 
neutrality ; in that respect fully sustaining the position 
of the President, and like him justifying neutrality be- 
cause of the opportunity it would afford the United 
States to be the peacemaker. 

"Our country," Mr. Roosevelt wrote, "stands well- 
nigh alone among the great civilized Powers in being 
unshaken by the present world-wide war. All of us 
on this continent ought to appreciate how fortunate 
we are that we of the Western World have been free 
from the working of the causes which have produced 
the bitter and vindictive hatred among the great mili- 
tary Powers of the Old World. We owe this immu- 
nity primarily to the policies grouped together under 



AMERICA AT TITE OI'TBREAK OF WAR 1^.0 

the title of the Monroe Doctrine. The ^Monroe Doc- 
trine is as vital to the interests of this hemisphere as 
it has ever been. . . . We must . . . stand ready to 
act as an instrument for the achievement of a just 
peace if or when the opportunity arises." 

Mr. Roosevelt was greatly impressed witli Ger- 
many's military efficiency and gave his approval to 
the very thing all the world is now pledged to destroy, 
German militarism. "As for her wonderful effi- 
ciency," he wrote, — "her equipment, the foresight 
and decision of her General Staff, her instantaneous 
action, her indomitable persistence — there can be 
nothing but the praise and admiration due to a stern, 
virile, and masterful people, a people entitled to 
hearty respect for their patriotism and farseeing self- 
devotion." 

Germany's justification for the violation of Belgian 
neutrality Mr. Roosevelt condoned: "Of course, if 
there is any meaning to the words 'right' and 'wrong' 
in international matters, the act was wrong. The 
men who shape German policy take the ground that 
in matters of vital national moment there are no such 
things as abstract right and wrong, and that when a 
great nation is struggling for iis existence it can no 
more consider the rights of neutral powers tlian it 
can consider the rights of its own citizens as these 
rights are construed in times of peace, and that every- 
thing must bend before the supreme law of national 
preservation. Whatever we may think of the moral- 



140 WOODROW ^^^LSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

it}' of this plea, it is certain that almost all great na- 
tions have in times past again and again acted in 
accordance with it. England's conduct toward Den- 
mark in the Napoleonic wars, and the conduct of both 
England and France toward us during the same wars, 
admit only of this species of justification ; and with 
less excuse the same is true of our conduct toward 
Spain and Florida nearly a century ago. I wish it 
exiDlicitly understood that I am not at this time pass- 
ing judgment one way or the other upon Germany for 
what she did to Belgium. ... I am merely calling 
attention to what has actually been done in Belgium, 
in accordance with what the Germans unquestionably 
sincerely believe to be the course of conduct necessi- 
tated by Germany's struggle for life." 

It was not the first time in history innocent people 
had been made to suffer, and the descendants of 
Germans and Irish in the United States could salve 
their consciences by the recollection that whatever 
Belgium was enduring, even greater had been the 
misery of their forefathers, Mr. Roosevelt told them. 
*'They [the Belgians] are suffering somewhat as my 
own German ancestors suffered when Turenne ravaged 
the Palatinate, somewhat as my Irish ancestors suf- 
fered in the struggles that attended the conquests and 
reconquests of Ireland in the days of Cromwell and 
William. The suffering is by no means as great, but 
it is very great. ... It is neither necessary nor at 
the present time possible to sift from the charges, 



AMERICA AT THE Ol'TBRKAK OF UAJl 111 

countercharges, and denials the exact facts as to the 
acts alleged to have been committed in various 
places. . . . 

"I think, at any rate I hope, I have rendered it 
plain that I am not now criticizing, that I am not pass- 
ing judgment one way or the other, upon Germany's 
action. I admire and respect the German people. 
I am proud of the German blood in my veins. When 
a nation feels that the issue of a contest in which, 
from whatever reason, it finds itself engaged will be 
national life or death, it is inevitable that it should 
act so as to save itself from death and to perpetuate 
its life. . . . The rights and wrongs of these cases 
where nations violate the rules of abstract morality in 
order to meet their own vital needs can be precisely 
determined only when all the facts are known and 
when men's blood is cool." 

Belgium, Mr. Roosevelt bluntly said, was no con- 
cern of the United States and it would be the height 
of folly were the United States to make the wrongs of 
Belgium her own. "A deputation of Belgians," he 
wrote, "has arrived in this country to invoke our 
assistance in the time of their dreadful need. What 
action our Government can or will take I know not. 
It has been announced that no action can be taken 
that will interfere with our entire neutrality. It is 
certainly eminently desirable that we should remain 
entirely neutral, and nothing but urgent need would 
warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides one 



142 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

way or the other. Our first duty is to hold ourselves 
ready to do whatever the changing circumstances 
demand in order to protect our own interests in the 
present and in the future. . . . Neutrality may be 
of prime necessity in order to preserve our own in- 
terests, to maintain peace in so much of the world as 
is not affected by the war, and to conserve our influ- 
ence for helping toward the reestablishment of gen- 
eral peace when the time comes ; for if any outside 
Power is able at such time to be the medium for bring- 
ing peace, it is more likely to be the United States than 
any other. . . . 

"Of course it would be folly to jump into the gulf 
ourselves to no good purpose; and very probably 
nothing that we could have done would have helped 
Belgium. We have not the smallest responsibility 
for what has befallen her, and I am sure the sympathy 
of this country for the suffering of the men, women 
and children of Belgium is very real. Nevertheless, 
the sympathy is compatible with full acknowledg- 
ment of the unwisdom of our uttering a single word 
of official protest unless we are prepared to make that 
protest effective; and only the clearest and most 
urgent national duty would ever justify us in deviat- 
ing from our rule of neutrality and non-interference." 

Mr. Wilson's refusal to utter "a single word of 
official protest" was deeply resented in England and 
France, and in those neutral countries then not even 
remotely affected by the war the almost callous in- 



AMERICA AT THE OITBREAK OF WAR 143 

difference of America to Gomiaii inramies creatcMl a 
painful impression that was not to be eradicated for 
nearly four years. The most powerful of all the neu- 
trals, one of the greatest and most powerful of the 
nations of the earth, geographically and politically so 
situated that it could without fear of consequences 
be the world's spokesman, a nation that had always 
prided itself upon its love of humanity and justice and 
detested cruelty and wrongdoing, was content in this 
supreme crisis to be dumb, by its silence to condone 
the crimes of Germany ; from crucified Belgium in her 
agony, seeking not assistance but the spiritual strength 
of sympathy, to turn aside with the measured words 
of official negation. 

If Mr. Wilson was oppressed by doubt as to the 
correctness of his course or was sensitive to foreign 
criticism — and as a sensitive man he must have 
winced under the attacks that while seemingly justi- 
fied were made without a knowledge of all the cir- 
cumstances — Mr. Roosevelt's unexpected defense 
must have reassured him and brought the conviction 
that he had put in words what the great majority of 
Americans believed. Neither political nor personal 
consideration, as Mr. Wilson well knew, actuated Mr. 
Roosevelt. Politically Mr. Roosevelt belonged to the 
opposing party (and two years later was to try un- 
successfully to secure the nomination for the Presi- 
dency against Mr. Wilson), nor, as sometimes happens 
with political opponents, in their private relations 



144 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

were they friends, each admiring the other because of 
common interests and the respect each had for the 
character of the other. Mr. Wilson knew that Mr. 
Roosevelt had expressed his honest conviction, that he 
was moved by no purpose other than to keep his 
country out of war and to be "the medium for bring- 
ing peace" ; that the duty of the United States, as Mr. 
Roosevelt saw it, was to protect her own interests, — 
in all this agreeing absolutely with Mr. Wilson, who 
had done only what Mr. Roosevelt would have done 
under like circumstances ; what Mr. Roosevelt would 
have done had Germany violated her treaties and 
ravaged Belgium in 1907, when he was President and 
it would have been incumbent upon him to receive 
the Belgian Commission and say in effect what Mr. 
Wilson said seven years later. 

In his openly expressed admiration and respect for 
the German people, his tribute to their military effi- 
ciency, foresight and self-denial, his extenuation of 
the violation of international law and his plea that 
as Germany was fighting for her national existence 
against overwhelming odds her infraction of public or 
private morality must be regarded as a comparatively 
venial offense, Mr. Wilson further knew that Mr. 
Roosevelt, who as a private person had the right to 
say what he felt, who was a man of intense conviction 
and seldom retracted a judgment, was saying boldly 
and courageously what he sincerely believed and 
wanted the country to know so as to color its decision. 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 115 

Mr. Wilson's course was in no sense dictated, or 
even influenced, by Mr. Roosevelt, because Mr. Wil- 
son reached his conclusion and announced it a week 
before Mr. Roosevelt's article in the Outlook apj^eared, 
yet it must have brought satisfaction to Mr. Wilson, 
as Mr. Roosevelt, perhaps more than any oilier man, 
was the voice of the "common people", the great 
mass. W^hat they thought, he so frequently said that 
he came to be regarded as vox populi. If, therefore, 
he could find excuse for Germany's conduct, if what 
Germany had done was no worse than what England 
and France had done, if he refused to sit in judgment 
on Germany, and inferentially asserted that Germany 
had a valid defense for the crimes of which she was 
alleged to be guilty, and, perhaps more important than 
all, that Germany was engaged not in a war of ag- 
gression and conquest but was forced into "a struggle 
for life", then it was certain that millions of Ameri- 
cans agreed with him and would be more than ever 
convinced there "was right on both sides", that it 
would be folly to be the partisan of either, and that 
self-interest required the maintenance of that strict 
neutrality which Mr. Wilson had advised and Mr. 
Roosevelt had so unreservedly approved. 

It is not easy to measure the influence of any man 
when that influence is exercised unofficially. Pre- 
cisely how great the influence of IVIr. Roosevelt was in 
these early months of the war when America was be- 
v;ildered, when she had not yet found herself and 



146 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

was groping through the fog of controversy and self- 
ishness, seeking the path of duty, it is impossible to tell ; 
but it must be believed that Mr. Roosevelt, next to 
the President, was the most potent force to keep the 
United States neutral, to persuade the American people 
that self-interest demanded they abstain from war, to 
soften the abhorrence caused by Germany's bombing 
of hospitals, the desecration of the Red Cross, the 
murder of civilians, the burning and sacking of towns, 
the defilement of young girls, the mutilation of sol- 
diers, and all the other outrages that ought to have 
set America aflame and in the name of humanity have 
united America in a protest that even Germany in 
her contemptuous brutality would not have dared 
disregard. That America was not united, that the 
holy fire of indignation was smothered, is not surprising 
in view of what has been told. Many months were 
to pass and many events were to happen before the 
counsel of prudence of September, 1914, was to be 
rejected and men were to give unselfish service and 
devotion to a great cause. 

5 

Mr. Wilson did not believe that the United States 
would be compelled to take up arms. He believed 
that the United States would be able to maintain 
friendly relations with all the belligerents and to serve 
them as no other nation could, and the only way this 
service could be rendered was to give no encourage- 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAll 147 

ment to those Americans who denianded war, Iml 
through the force of suggestion and his appeal to in- 
tellect and emotion to keep before the public always 
the benefit to come from keeping the peace, and to 
make peace possible by harmonizing the racial jeal- 
ousies and sympathies of his own people. But he 
viewed war as a possibility, remote, it is true, but 
still a possibility, and never to be dismissed as im- 
possible. He was placed in a position of extreme 
difficulty. He could by making preparations, if not 
for war at least for defense, do the very thing he was 
anxious above all things to avoid, and what was then 
merely a possibility would become more than a proba- 
bility. Any military measures he might have taken 
would immediately have aroused the distrust and 
suspicion of both belligerents, uncertain whether 
the United States was to be counted as an enemy or 
an ally ; and at home, to the partisans of England and 
Germany, there could be only one meaning : the 
President was getting ready for war ; both sides would 
have been certain he was their ally, and the effect 
would have been deplorable. This is based on the 
assumption, of course, that Congress and the country 
would have given the President carte blanche in money 
and legislation to bring the military forces up to the 
required strength and provide them with the guns, 
munitions and other articles in which they were totally 
deficient, asking neither accounting for the money 
expended nor explanation of the policy he intended to 



148 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

pursue ; or that Congress and the country would have 
made it clear to Germany that when the United States 
was ready it would declare war. 

This is an unwarranted assumption. Certainly 
neither in 1914, nor in 1915, nor in 1916 would Congress 
have given the President the unlimited power that 
later he was to possess ; nor would the country have 
sanctioned it even had Congress been willing to grant 
it. Had Mr. Wilson asked for money and authority 
to be used at his discretion and without rendering an 
explicit statement of what he proposed to do, his 
request would have been refused. Of that there can 
be no doubt. Neither Congress nor the country was 
in a mood for war nor for anything being done pro- 
vocative of war. No less unwarranted is the assump- 
tion that at any time between August, 1914, and 
April, 1917, Mr. Wilson, had he been, as his oppo- 
nents asserted, a more resolute and determined man, 
less wedded to his exaggerated love of peace, able to 
reach a quick decision instead of cautiously weighing 
and always postponing action, could have made war 
on Germany with a united country behind him. The 
proof that Mr. Wilson was powerless is to be found 
not only in the temper of the country, repeatedly ex- 
hibited, but also in the votes of Congress, where in 
both parties the adherents of Germany were numerous 
and actively hostile. More than once efforts were 
made to redress England's advantage of sea power 
legitimately exercised by a dishonest revision of in- 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 140 

ternational hiw for the benefit of Germany, which, in 
effect, would have changed the status of the United 
States from neutrahty to covert alHance with Ger- 
many ; and the Administration was only saved from 
the most serious consequences by a narrow margin. 
Up to the very eve of war these conditions continued. 
War was declared against Germany on April 6, 1917, 
yet on the previous fourth of March, when Mr. Wilson 
made a last efiFort to avert war by declaring a state of 
armed neutrality against Germany, there were enough 
senators openly disloyal and undisguisedly the pro- 
tectors of Germany to prevent the passage of the 
resolution. The declaration of w^ar against Germany 
was resisted in both Houses of Congress, and in both 
Houses an opposition vote was recorded ; likewise 
conscription was opposed and an attempt made to 
defeat the necessary legislation. It is quite true that 
at no time between August, 1914, and April, 1917, 
could a resolution declaring war against England 
have been adopted, but it is equally true that, until 
Germany actually forced war upon the United States, 
a declaration of war against Germany would have met 
the same end. To assume otherwise is either dis- 
honesty or ignorance. 

iNIr. Wilson, in short, acted precisely as Lincoln did 
in 1861, and Lincoln was denounced by the extremists 
for shilly-shallying, for talking, for being afraid to act 
and giving encouragement to the South by his ex- 
cessive caution, when had he been a real leader of men 



150 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

he would have made war on twenty-four hours' notice. 
Lincoln had to do then what Mr. Wilson had to do half 
a century later. Lincoln was less concerned about his 
military strength than he was about his political 
solidarity ; armies he knew could be raised, but with- 
out united political support the armies would be 
struck with paralysis ; and Lincoln waited, with in- 
finite patience he waited, submitting to unmerited 
abuse, never petulant or resentful ; playing a part 
so admirable and yet so wise that even the men near- 
est to him did not appreciate his skill and tact and 
purpose; always shaping the thoughts of his people 
in the right direction until, certain at last the people 
were behind him, he struck. Under similar circum- 
stances Mr. Wilson (who has been a close student of 
Lincoln and his political methods) had the same dif- 
ficult part to play, but Lincoln's task was light com- 
pared to Mr. Wilson's. With Lincoln the period of 
suspense was a few months, with Wilson it was mul- 
tiplied tenfold ; Lincoln had to contend only with the 
South and the dissidents of the North ; Wilson had to 
reckon with a foreign-born population nearly three 
times that of the South, and the avowed and secret 
sympathizers of Germany and the enemies of Eng- 
land in Congress and in every class of society in every 
State of the Union, Of that period in his country's 
history Mr. Wilson had written — and it sums up in 
a few words the precise mental attitude of his coun- 
trymen more than half a century later: "Policy had 



AMERICA AT THE OUTBREAK OF WAR 1.51 

to carry the people with it ; had to await the awaken- 
ing of the national idea into full consciousness; and 
this first pause of doubt and reflection did but render 
the ultimate outcome the more certain." 

That Mr. Wilson from the first saw the great moral 
issue of the war has been made plain ; that he saw the 
necessity of also making his people see the war not as 
affecting their material interests but as a question of 
morals we cannot doubt. Often he must have pon- 
dered the question and asked himself as he kept his 
vigil whether the thing that was clear to him could be 
made equally plain to his people ; what he must do to 
bring to them understanding. 



CHAPTER VIII 

"Too Proud to Fight" 
1 

Seldom does one nation know another, and perhaps 
there were no two nations whose people had so little 
comprehension of the other as the English and the 
Americans until the war made them companions in 
arms and broke down all barriers. It was because no 
barriers were supposed to exist and they enjoyed the 
advantage of a common tongue that, paradoxically, 
raised the greatest barrier. Few Englishmen know a 
foreign language, and not knowing it they do not 
pretend to know the country ; even if they speak the 
language they do not presume to know the country 
after visiting it for a few weeks. On both sides of 
the Atlantic this obstacle to intercourse was removed ; 
customs were substantially the same, methods were not 
so different that they were "foreign", consequently 
neither American nor Englishman believed he had 
anything to learn. In England and America men who 
made a special study of foreign countries, who patiently 
learned their history and institutions and by ob- 
servation and experience knew the temper of their 
peoples, were treated with the respect knowledge 

152 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 153 

commands ; but in England and America the American 
or English specialist was regarded with suspicion and 
looked upon with distrust. The Englishman, the 
student of America, who was not blind to the faults 
of America and yet fair enough to recognize her merits, 
was, in the opinion of his countrymen, an unsafe 
mentor and an unreliable guide because he had become 
too "Americanized" and was more American than the 
Americans. The American in similar circumstances 
lost caste at home. He was that most despised of 
all beings, "un-American"; he was out of touch with 
his own country, and his former robust nationality 
had become corrupted and was now epicene. One 
has only to recall the contumely suffered by American 
ambassadors to England to find proof of what used 
to be the American attitude. Mr. Bayard was cen- 
sured by the House of Representatives for having 
told the truth ; Mr. Lowell was frequently attacked ; 
and even at a time so recent as the McKinley Adminis- 
tration, Mr. Hay was criticized because he was able 
to admire England without betraying his own country. 
In 1861 when the North was fighting in defense of 
human liberty and to vindicate a great political 
principle, Americans were indignant because English- 
men apparently cared nothing about the moral issues 
involved, — which Americans believed ought to appeal 
to them with peculiar force, — but were interested in 
the war only as it enabled them to make money or 
curtail profits. This was perhaps harsh judgment. 



154 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

but natural. Motley, writing to the Duke of Argyll, 
in June, 1861, said: "The Americans would have 
scorned material aid. But they did expect sym- 
pathy. They thought that some voice in high places 
would have been lifted up to say, 'We are sorry for 
your trials ; we are compelled to look on with folded 
arms, but your cause is noble. Our hearts are with 
you. You are right in resolving upon two things — 
first to prevent the further extension of the system of 
African slavery, which you had the constitutional 
power of doing; and secondly to maintain your 
nationality, your unity, which is all that saves you 
from anarchy and barbarism.' Instead of all this 
there came denunciation of the wickedness of civil 
war — as if the war had not been forced upon the 
Government." Lowell in "The Biglow Papers" put 
the same thought in doggerel when he wrote : 
"We know we've got a cause, John, 

That's honest, just and true ; 
We thought 't would win applause, John, 

Ef nowheres else, from you." 
And John was told that his mark was on the guns 
supplied to the Confederacy and all he cared about 
was his ten 'per cent. 

It was now England who complained that Brother 
Jonathan's mark was on the cotton and meats and 
other things going to her enemy, and that all that 
Brother Jonathan cared about was profits of four 
hundred or five hundred per cent. Brother Jonathan's 



"TOO PROID TO FIGHT" 155 

ideas having considerably expanded since the late un- 
pleasantness. Thousands of Englislimen, without 
exaggeration one may say the whole British Empire, 
felt as Motley did. England was not asking for 
material assistance, but she did expect sympathy. 
She knew her cause was just, she knew that the war 
was not of her seeking but had been forced upon her, 
she knew that she was fighting the battle of civilization 
and that the outcome of that battle would determine 
the future of America no less than that of England ; 
that if England were to be enslaved and autocracy to 
rule the world America would lose her liberty and no 
longer enjoy the freedom for which she had fought. 
England hoped that some voice in high places would 
be lifted up, that despite oflficial neutrality, the neces- 
sity of which she recognized, there would be men to 
give her the grasp of friendship and the comforting 
word of encouragement, to bid her be of good cheer 
and remember that the heart of America was w^th 
her. There were men in America who did this, just 
as Bright and Cobden half a century earlier had 
recognized that the North was right, had longed for 
its success and had not hesitated to say so ; but 
Englishmen as a whole were selfish and indifferent, 
their newspapers caricatured and abused Mr. Lincoln, 
and Americans, with bitterness in their hearts, were 
compelled to read the same glorification of the South 
and its defense that Englishmen road in Mr. Roose- 
velt's Outlook article praising Germany for provoking 



156 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

war, for her militarism and justifying her violation of 
international law. 

England was placed at a further disadvantage, 
partly through her own density and incomprehension 
of American temperament, partly through the ironic 
accident of a vicious system. It has been said before, 
and it cannot be too often repeated, that to the Amer- 
ican people as a whole the war was not their affair ; 
it concerned neither their interests, their honor nor 
their national security, and that when Mr. Roosevelt 
said : "we have not the smallest responsibility for what 
has befallen" Belgium he put in words the dominant 
thought. It was a European and not an American war, 
and by no circumstance could America be drawn into 
it. That the war would be brought to America, that 
America would have to fight to defend her interests, 
that Germany would force war upon her as she had 
forced it upon England and France (and it must never 
be forgotten that Americans were not sure that Ger- 
many was the aggressor or that the guilt could not be 
in equal measure apportioned among all the belliger- 
ents), was to Americans impossible and inconceivable. 
Those Americans who knew the merits of the issue, 
who speculated even at that time whether America 
could remain unscathed, were few. 

England had a good "case", but unfortunately it 
was not properly presented. Almost immediately 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 157 

I'ollowing the oulbroak of the war the American press 
was deluged with the outpourings of English writers, 
the majority known in America as writers of fiction 
or clever essayists, but with no pretensions to a knowl- 
edge of politics, international law or history. Eng- 
land, Americans were told, was fighting as much for 
America as she was for herself, for which Americans 
ought to feel properly thankful. Americans could 
not see this, nor could they be made to believe it. 
Forming judgment from the information they 
possessed, they refused to accept biased statements 
that England was inspired by altruism, or that she was 
safeguarding America any more than she was protecting 
Peru. England was fighting in her own defense, which 
was legitimate and for which no American blamed 
her ; but it was impertinent for Englishmen to remind 
America of an obligation she did not recognize, and 
naturally it was resented. In short, the effect of this 
badly organized propaganda, which was carried on 
without method or system and in ignorance of the 
temper of America, did very great harm ; and the 
irritation it aroused was not allayed by the English 
taunt that all America cared for was to make profits 
by trading with the enemy ; especially when it was 
knowTi to Americans that England went into the war 
blithely declaring "business as usual"; and one of 
the leading Liberal newspapers of England opposed 
the war on the ground that if she remained neutral 
England could engage in the very profitable business 



158 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of selling munitions and other supplies to both 
belligerents. 

A system that appoints men without the slightest 
regard for their fitness to cope with unanticipated 
conditions had sent to Washington in the year before 
the war as the diplomatic representative of Great 
Britain, when all that was required of a diplomatist 
to be successful was to be amiable and pay his social 
debts with punctilious exactitude, a man of many 
brilliant parts, witty, talented, likeable ; who with 
equal facility wrote poetry that was touched with fire 
and coined epigrams that seared like fire, which he 
scattered with spendthrift prodigality ; but who 
temperamentally and for other causes was quite un- 
suited for a post requiring the greatest tact, patience 
and good temper; who must be firm without giving 
offence and be able generously to yield when compliance 
is wisdom ; who ought to have been sympathetic and 
able to understand the difficulties and the many deli- 
cate and complex problems which the Administration 
had to face. The stage was well set for tragedy. 



At the outbreak of the war the British Navy~'con- 
tained the German fleet, which ceased to be a danger 
and became only the textbook menace of a fleet in 
being; and very soon Great Britain was to drive the 
German merchant marine off the seas and hold their 
undisputed possession. It was this control of ocean- 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 159 

borne commerce and tlie j)o\ver legitimately exercised 
to prevent contraband from reaching the enemy that 
brought Enghuid in sharp conflict with the United 
States in the opening months of the war and increased 
the feehng in the United States against Enghmd. 

From the standpoint of selfish interest this was 
natural. Dependent upon foreign countries for raw 
materials vital to the prosecution of the war and with 
the seas closed to«her own flag, Germany attempted to 
obtain what she required through neutrals, and as her 
needs were great she gladly offered to pay practically 
any price demanded. Not since the American Civil 
War had blockade running become so profitable. The 
profits were enormous and the risk was not great; at 
the worst the loss of cargo, sometimes of vessel as well 
as cargo ; but the conveyance of contraband, while a 
violation of international law, was not a crime, the 
men engaged in it knew their lives were not forfeit 
when captured, and the profits w^ere so great that ship 
owners could afford to take long chances. To Ameri- 
cans who had things to sell that Germany was anxious 
to buy, who knew that England and her Allies were 
buying in America and every other country whatever 
they needed, it seemed unfair and harmful ; it de- 
prived them of the profits to which they believed they 
were properly entitled, by being prevented from trad- 
ing with Germany. At that time German propa- 
ganda was insidious ; it was carried on not without 
ability and did very great harm because the British 



160 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Government took no measures to offset it and it was 
not incumbent on the United States to interfere. 
All that was required of the United States was to hold 
the ring and see that no foul blows were struck con- 
trary to the rules of neutrality. 

Mr, Wilson's position was to become increasingly 
difficult. He had seen that the war was not a contest 
of arms but a moral struggle; he hoped that this 
enlightenment might be brought to his own people, and 
he knew that if he was to make them see eye to eye with 
him, above all things his course must be strictly correct ; 
he must be as impartial as the judgment of God ; not 
by a hair's breadth must he swerve from the straight 
line or show the slightest favoritism. To do other- 
wise would be to lose his hold, to risk the imputation 
that instead of being the just judge he was the unfair 
partisan. His strength was to be his seeming weak- 
ness ; that weakness the public so eagerly ascribed to 
him, the timidity that made him continually balance 
and strike an even score by charging one offense 
against another, that indecision that was always to 
prevent action when the course of action was so clearly 
mapped. It was perhaps a natural criticism when the 
motives that guided Mr. Wilson were not known and 
could not be revealed ; it was the same charge brought 
against Lincoln, accused of inconsistency, of a weak- 
ness for compromising between right and wrong, and 
roundly abused for it by a public that always freely 
said what it thought. Nevertheless Mr. Wilson was 



"TOO PROl'D TO FIGHT" 101 

compelled to keep silent because his only hope of suc- 
cess lay in the nation being converted without knowing 
that tlie forces of conversion were at work. For Mr. 
Wilson boldly to have proclaimed: "I come as a mis- 
sionary among you to be the means whereby you may be 
converted and embrace the true faith" would have been 
to invite scorn and defiance and defeat his purpose. 
But it w^as as a missionary he labored, and his converts 
were to be an entire people. 

Controversies with Germany were from the begin- 
ning of a more serious nature than with Great Britain 
and were ultimately to lead to war, for with Germany 
they concerned the taking of life while with Great 
Britain they concerned merely the taking of or inter- 
ference with property ; but, curiously enough, it was 
not the criminal actions of Germany but the alleged 
illegal acts of England that aroused the deepest feeling 
in the United States. That the historian of the future, 
when all the evidence is presented and can be im- 
partially reviewed, will exonerate England of illegality 
and bear generous tribute to her excessive moderation 
and forbearance no one can doubt, but the American 
people were not in a historical mood and were com- 
pelled to form judgment on imperfect knowledge. 
AMiat they knew was that their vessels were being 
held up and searched and their cargoes were frequently 
seized and confiscated after trial in an English prize 
court, which it was natural for them, ignorant of the 
practice of international law, to regard as partial 



162 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

and always ready to stretch the law and facts in 
favor of the British Government. The agents of 
Germany, tireless, unscrupulous, with unlimited means 
at tlieir command to influence public opinion, adroitly 
fostered the discontent by dwelling on the arbitrary 
acts of England and contrasting the course of England 
and Germany. AVlien Germany bombed hospitals 
or sunk an English ship, — which was denied or con- 
veniently disposed of as an incident of war, — it 
brought no loss to Americans, but when England 
seized a rich cargo Americans suffered a heavy financial 
loss ; and while Germany was longing to pour her 
wealth into America through the purchase of Ameri- 
can goods England was the dog in the manger who 
barred the way, not because she might have to go 
without, as there was enough for both, but out of pure 
selfishness. She wanted to punish Germany, and she 
was envious of America's good fortune ; she begrudged 
the money America was making and dreaded the 
future when America would be a keener trade rival. 
It is not surprising that many Americans should have 
honestly believed that England's course was less 
honorable than Germany's, and that it was Eng- 
land and not Germany with whom eventually they 
might have to reckon. 

Because of the policy he was pursuing, furthermore 
because of the duty he believed was imposed upon 
the United States to champion and protect the rights 
of neutrals and safeguard the accepted principles 



"TOO rilOUD TO FIGHT" 1C3 

of intornalional law, Mr. Wilson fell it iiuuinhcnt 
iij)on him to bring lo llie allcMilion of llie British 
Government what his legal advisers, — whose vision 
was then limited by claiming the rights neutrals are 
always insistent upon in time of war, — asserted to 
be infractions of the code of nations. The exchange 
of notes began in the early days of the war and con- 
tinued with little cessation during the next two years. 
On December 26, 1914, Mr. Bpyan, as Secretary of 
State, found it necessary to send a long dispatch to 
the British Government, couched in a friendly tone 
but firmly stating the American position ; the condi- 
tion of American foreign trade having become "so 
serious as to require a candid statement of the views 
of this Government in order that the British Govern- 
ment may be fully informed as to the attitude of the 
United States toward the policy which has been pur- 
sued by the British authorities during the present 
war." The commerce of nonbelligerents, Mr. Bryan 
asserted, ought not to be interfered with by bellig- 
erents unless that interference was imperatively 
necessary for national safety. Disavowing any selfish 
desire to gain undue commercial advantage, the 
American Government was reluctantly forced to the 
conclusion that the British policy toward . neutral 
ships and cargoes "exceeds the manifest necessity 
of a belligerent and constitutes restrictions upon the 
rights of American citizens upon the high seas which 
are not justified by the rules of international law or 



164 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

required under the principle of self-preservation." 
The situation created was, Mr. Bryan represented, a 
critical one to the commercial interests of the United 
States, suffering because their products were denied 
access to long established neutral European markets, 
and he relied upon the British sense of justice to remove 
the difficulties and obstacles placed in the way of 
American commerce. 

"In conclusion," Mr. Bryan wrote, "it should be 
impressed upon His Majesty's Government that the 
present condition of American trade with the neutral 
European countries is such that, if it does not improve, 
it may arouse a feeling contrary to that which has so 
long existed between the American and British peoples. 
Already it is becoming more and more the subject of 
public criticism and complaint. There is an increasing 
belief, doubtless not entirely unjustified, that the 
present British policy toward American trade is 
responsible for the depression in certain industries 
which depend upon European markets. The atten- 
tion of the British Government is called to this possible 
result of their present policy to show how widespread 
the effect is upon the industrial life of the United 
States and to emphasize the importance of removing 
the cause of complaint." 

The effect this dispatch produced upon the English 
mind can be easily imagined. Any doubt existing 
that the interest the United States had in the war was 
measured by its profits was now dispelled. 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 1G5 

4 

On the seventh of May, 1915, the Lusitatiia was 
torpedoed. Before that Germany had committed 
more atrocious crimes, since then the atrocities of 
which Germany has been guilty make the sinking of 
the Lusitariia trivial, but nothing that Germany has 
done so profoundly affected the moral sense of the 
entire world. In America there went up a cry for 
vengeance ; many persons who had conscientiously 
obeyed the President's injunction to be neutral in 
thought and action now openly proclaimed their 
detestation of Germany and felt that the United States 
must, to preserve her own self-respect and dignity 
and in vindication of the rights of humanity, declare 
war on Germany. But the President remained un- 
moved. He sat in the Wliite House a solitary and 
lonely figure (Mrs. Wilson had died two days after 
England declared war) , listening to the growing storm ; 
listening and pondering and waiting. He knew of 
the mounting excitement, he knew that nothing 
would be more gratifying to the men who had been 
the partisans of England from the first than the 
uniting of their country with England and France in 
the war against Germany ; he knew that the torpedo 
fired by a German submarine commander had become a 
powerful agent in bringing the moral issue home to 
the nation ; he knew he had but to speak, and the 
indifferent and the apathetic would be quickened 
and they would join in the demand for war; but he 



166 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

also knew, and perhaps no man knew it so well as he, 
that the destruction of the Lusitania had not united 
his people. There were still two camps, the partisans 
of Germany had not been converted; Americans who 
believed the war was none of their affair were shaken, 
but not convinced. And he knew that to go to war 
with a divided country was impossible. Moreover 
he had not abandoned hope that the United States 
could be kept out of the war; and while from the 
depths of the Atlantic the dead of the Lusitania 
besought him that they be not forgotten, and he 
was resolved that never should they be forgotten 
and in the fullness of time their murder should be 
expiated,^ he still cherished the faith that policy might 
so shape events that the toll of American life would 
not have to be increased. 

Some days before the Lusitania had been sent to the 
bottom Mr. Wilson had accepted an invitation to address 
a meeting of newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia 
on the evening of May 10, It was known of course 
that the Government of the United States could not 
permit such a gross violation of international law as the 
sinking of the Lusitania and the murder of its citizens 
to go unnoticed, and the public eagerly awaited the 
President's action, speculating whether it would be 
such a vigorous demand on Germany for reparation 

• See the President's speech delivered at the Metropolitan Opera House, 
New York, September 27, 1918: "Our brothers from many lands, as well 
as our own murdered dead under the sea, were calling to us, and we re- 
sponded, Bercely and of course." 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 1G7 

and assurances that the crime would not be repeated 
that, virtually, it would be an ultimatum and force 
the United States into the war on the side of the Allies, 
or whether Mr. Wilson would be content to engage in a 
diplomatic duel with Germany. Mr. Wilson gave no 
sign. In accordance with his custom at a time of crisis 
he withdrew from practically all contact with his offi- 
cial advisers or public men ; isolated and aloof, per- 
haps seeking spiritual guidance, — as Lincoln did more 
than once and Robert E. Lee is known to have spent 
the night in prayer before his duty was revealed to 
him that his allegiance was to his State and not to his 
Government, — Mr. Wilson took counsel of himself 
but none other, and the people believed he would 
reveal himself in the forthcoming speech. 

For a man so well balanced and mentally so nicely 
poised as Mr. Wilson, who keeps himself well under 
restraint and thinks with such clearness that his 
thoughts are always translated into the simplest 
and most direct language, it is curious that more than 
once he has lapsed into the same "blazing indiscre- 
tions*' that gave the late Lord Salisbury his reputa- 
tion. In asking Congress to repeal the exemption 
clause of the Panama Canal Act Mr. Wilson, it will 
be recalled, said : "I ask this of you in support of the 
foreign policy of the Administration. I shall not 
know how to deal with other matters of even greater 
delicacy and nearer consequence if you do not grant 
it to me in ungrudging measure;" and in view of the 



168 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

strained relations then existing with Mexico and Japan, 
Congress and the country naturally concluded that 
the situation was even more critical than they sus- 
pected, and patriotism demanded instant submission 
to the President's demand. Had Mr. Wilson a less 
direct and more tortuous mind, "thinking tortuous 
thoughts, naught honest, but all roundabout", did 
he delight in seeming frankness to conceal subtle 
designs, one might believe that he deliberately used 
words susceptible of more than one interpretation, 
but that theory can be dismissed without further 
question. Some months after Mr. Wilson made his 
address to Congress he said that his words on that 
occasion had been misunderstood ; and his explanation 
throws an illuminating light on his character. At 
that time Mr. Wilson received the Washington corre- 
spondents twice a week and in the course of informal 
conversation told them such things as he considered 
it advisable for them to know; these conversations 
were not published verbatim, but a stenographic report 
was taken and filed in the White House archives. 
With the consent of the President the report was pub- 
lished that clarified the misunderstanding. Mr. Wilson 
said that in using the language he did when asking 
Congress to repeal the exemption clause he was not 
thinking of any situation immediately critical, but 
what he had in mind was a situation that might arise 
in the future, that might be more critical and more 
delicate than that which confronted him at the time 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" IG!) 

he spoke, and the shameful position in which tlie 
United States would be placed if the world believed 
thai the United States made treaties, accepted in 
good faith by other nations, and then construed them 
to suit her own convenience or advantage. It was, in 
short, an appeal to Congress not to consider material 
gain but to respect a moral obligation, so to act toward 
the world that the United States need suffer no loss of 
self-respect or feel the reproach of the world believing 
that the United States would gladly sacrifice its honor 
to secure an unworthy bargain. More than once Mr. 
Wilson was to do this same thing; to think in larger 
terms of the future while the public was thinking in 
the smaller things of the present, and thereby to 
confuse and anger the public ; and now he was about 
to do it even more dramatically, with its attendant 
consequences of greater confusion and more lasting 
and deep-seated anger. 

]VIr. Wilson prepared his speech before the news of 
the sinking of the Lusitania reached him ; segregated, 
he still had means of knowang the temper of the 
country, and he must have known with what intense 
anxiety the world awaited his deliverance and the 
construction that would be put on his every word. 
The speech as written was not changed. He repeated 
what he had said many times since his election ; he dwelt 
upon the mission of America to humanize the world, 
its duty to set an example of peace to the world ; he 
pictured America created to unite men and to elevate 



170 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

mankind, dwelling especially, as applicable to his 
audience, on the obligation of every man to dedicate 
himself to America and to leave all other countries 
behind, and then he astonished every one and amazed 
the country no less than the entire world by saying : 

"The example of America must be a special example. 
The example of America must be the example not 
merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace 
because peace is the healing and elevating influence 
of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing 
as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a 
thing as a nation being so right that it does not need 
to convince others by force that it is right." 

That was the only reference to the thing that en- 
grossed all men. The President's speech was pub- 
lished in full in the leading newspapers, but that 
sentence — "there is such a thing as a man being too 
proud to fight" — stripped of its context, was singled 
out ; it was flung on telegraph wires and cables to the 
far corners of the earth, and it was accepted by the 
world as the President's reply to Germany. Germany 
had sunk the Lusitania, Germany had murdered Ameri- 
can men and women and little children, and America, 
speaking through her President, could find no word of 
scorn or condemnation for the guilty, no pity for the 
dead, no promise they should be avenged ; it could 
feel no generous prompting of passion, but was con- 
tent proudly to glory in her cowardice. 

Bitterly attacked in his own country, lampooned, 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 171 

satirized and jeered at abroad, any other man 
temperamentally different would have offered ex- 
planation or defense, or at least through his friends 
sought to soften the harsh judgment of the world 
and make it plain that what he said and the inter- 
pretation given to it did him an injustice. Mr. Wilson 
did nothing. With what might very well have been 
thought the superb indifference of disdain, with what 
the public might very well believe was utter contempt 
for what it said or thought or believed, — but which, 
in fact, was an extraordinary exhibition of courage 
and self-control, — Mr. Wilson dismissed the matter 
as if it were too trivial to require further attention. 
He had unlimited confidence, it was a confidence 
almost fatalistic, in the ultimate triumph of right and 
reason and the victory of morality in the long struggle. 
Lincoln, we are told, as an advocate of the abolition 
of slavery and prohibition saw that they could not 
be hastened, that they could be safely agitated but 
must not be prematurely pressed, and it was wisdom 
to wait until "in God's own time they will be organized 
into law and thus be woven into the fabric of our 
institutions." ISIr. Wilson had the more difficult 
task not to crj'stallize moral sentiment into law, which 
is the foundation on which all law rests, for in a free 
country law is simply the concrete expression of moral- 
ity, but to weld passion, prejudice and self-interest 
into a great moral renunciation. 

There is a curious thing in connection with the 



172 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

President's use of the phrase "too proud to fight" 
which is worth mention and is of interest to the psy- 
chologist. Mr. Wilson is a Southerner by birth, 
descent and tradition, and although all his life from 
early manhood has been lived in the North, heredity 
is ineradicable. To the Southerner, especially the 
Southerner of the generation of Mr. Wilson's child- 
hood, "proud" has a different meaning and is used 
in a different sense than it is by the Northerner. Men 
of the North seldom talk about their pride; men of 
the South frequently do, and they mean not pride in 
the Shaksperian sense, but in the same sense that 
the American of the North or the Englishman does 
self-respect. A Southerner will say, "I am too proud 
to do it," a Northerner or an Englishman would say, 
"My self-respect will not allow it." It was un- 
doubtedly in that sense Mr. Wilson, subconsciously 
reacting to his Southern heritage, used "proud", 
meaning that there are occasions when a nation, no 
matter how great the temptation, must not fight, 
just as an individual, to save his own self-respect, 
must not engage in a brawl. 

It will not be necessary critically to consider the 
long correspondence that passed between the American 
and German Governments, but the sinking of the 
Lusitania brought the first break in Mr. Wilson's 
Cabinet and led to the resignation of Mr. Bryan on 
the following eighth of June. "In a country of com- 
plex foreign relations," says Bagehot, "it would mostly 



"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT" 173 

happen that the first and most critical year of cver}-^ 
war would be managed by a peace Premier," and Mr. 
Wilson in this first critical year found himself burdened 
with a peace Secretary of State. Mr. Bryan was 
no greater lover of peace than jNIr. Wilson ; both men 
were pacifists as the term had been used in the days 
when statesmen loudly denied their love of militarism 
and asked support because of their attachment to 
peace ; both men detested war and to them hate among 
nations was criminal and an offense against the Christ 
they served, but there was a marked difference be- 
tween the statesmanship of Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Bryan and his duty as each conceived it. On the 
common platform of peace they could meet, but Mr. 
Bryan would stick to his platform and expose himself 
to bullets, refusing to fire a shot in his own protection, 
while Mr. Wilson knew when the time had come to 
leave the platform and pick up the weapon at hand 
that even the most zealous pacifist may not despise 
if he is not to permit his principles to become folly. 
Under no circumstances could Mr. Bryan be made 
to fight ; Mr. Wilson was trying to avoid being forced 
to fight, but he would not run from it. Mr. Bryan's 
position in the Cabinet of Mr. Wilson became im- 
possible, and he resigned to be succeeded by Mr. 
Robert Lansing. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Evangelist 
1 

Events were rapidly bringing about a situation to 
cause Mr. Wilson the gravest concern. The sinking 
of the Lusitania and other vessels by Germany, the 
never-ceasing friction with England because of her 
alleged interference with the rights of American 
and neutral commerce, the horror and detestation 
Americans had for Germany because of her crimes 
on land and sea and the way in which she made 
war in defiance of all moral and international law; 
the growing solidification of the American people into 
the partisans of England or Germany ; the efforts 
almost without concealment of Germans in America 
to fight for Germany in the United States by destroy- 
ing factories having British Government contracts, 
sinking ships, equipping expeditions and in numerous 
other criminal ways attempting to violate the neu- 
trality of the United States, made the observance of 
neutrality increasingly 'difficult. 

The contempt in which the Administration was held 
by those Americans who from the beginning had been the 
supporters of England and since the sinking of the 

174 



THE EV.VNGELIST 175 

Lusitania with growing bitterness and violence de- 
nounced the President for not liaving dechired war; llie 
lonii)erol' Congress, where in hotli i)arties Enghmd was 
defended and defamed and Germany was protected 
and attacked ; the vehemence of the press, which 
had ceased to be neutral and was either the outspoken 
champion of Enghmd or equally without disguise up- 
held the cause of Germany, or, too cowardly to take 
a positive stand and risk losing advertisers or offend- 
ing subscribers, professed impartiality by alternately 
attributing responsibility for the war to both belliger- 
ents, or tried to curry favor with both sides by express- 
ing no views and holding no opinions showed the dan- 
gerous state of public sentiment. Mr. Wilson still hoped 
neutrality could be maintained, but while the Govern- 
ment continued to be ofiBcially neutral, the country, 
Mr. Wilson well knew, had ceased to be neutral either 
in thought or action. 

It was not sufficient to allow time to shape destiny, 
patiently to wait in the hope that an awakened con- 
science would make men no longer content to palter 
with morality. Passionate resentment on the one side 
was met with lethargic indifference on the other, and 
to the great mass of Americans the war still remained 
none of their business. Better than any other man 
Mr. Wilson knew the temperament of his own people, 
the springs that moved them, the ideals they cherished, 
and he had sufficient confidence in the correctness of 
his appraisement of their character to believe that if 



176 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

lie could make them see that the whole character 
of the war had changed, that he himself saw it in a 
new light, that it was no longer a war as the world 
hitherto had always thought about war, to satisfy the 
ambition of kings, or to appease national pride, or to 
gain by conquest what could not be gained in any 
other way, but it was a war of principle, a war that 
threatened freedom and imperiled liberty and the 
democracy that was the foundation of American in- 
stitutions, the American people would no more hesi- 
tate, but would be as resolute for war and gladly make 
whatever sacrifice was necessary in supporting the 
Allied cause as, at the beginning of their history, they 
had fought against royal tyranny and legislative op- 
pression, and, in the following century, again had taken 
up arms in defense of human liberty and to maintain 
the principle of their political unity. This they must 
be made to see, not only to see but to feel ; before they 
would draw the sword, in them must be the spirit of 
the crusader; they must be made to fight for an idea 
no less than an ideal and in a spirit of knight errantry 
go forth to battle. 

It was no easy thing to do. In his dispatch to the 
British Government in December, 1914, Mr. Bryan 
had stressed British interference with neutral trade 
and the heavy financial loss to American interests. 
Immediately following the outbreak of the war Amer- 
ican bankers and merchants, heavily indebted to 
England, were required to make provision to meet 



THE EVANGELIST 177 

llu'ir obligations, normal trade between America and 
England was dislocated, bnsiness between America 
and neutrals came virtually to a standstill, commerce 
between America and Germany and Austria practi- 
cally ceased ; sterling exchange went to a prohibitive 
price, the commerce of the whole world was in con- 
fusion ; in America men were uncertain as to the 
future, it was a time for caution, business came al- 
most to a halt until the skies lifted ; it looked as if 
America was in for a bad time and was facing hard- 
ship and distress. But this period of semi-panic and 
fear lasted only a short time and the skies soon lifted. 
It was not long before the British Government began 
to place huge contracts in the United States, and a 
few months later Great Britain, France and Russia 
were buying on an enormous scale, recklessly and 
stupidly bidding against each, buying without any 
regard to system or value but in their desperation and 
haste willingly paying almost any price demanded, 
their needs being largely in excess of the supply. The 
whole world was looking to America. Not only were 
the belligerents supplementing their inadequate means 
of production with the resources of the new world, 
buying not alone munitions but foodstuffs and raw 
materials, but the neutrals, their normal channels 
closed to them, were compelled to turn to America, 
purchasing on their own account or acting as the 
agents of Germany, engaged in a trade so profitable 
that there was no haggling about price, and whatever 



178 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the conscience of Americans permitted them to ask 
was paid without demur. It is not a figure of speech 
touched with the fancy of rhetoric, but as matter of 
fact as the subject itself, that a golden stream flowed 
across the Atlantic and gave new life and strength not 
alone to the factories and industrial plants of America 
but also to her agriculture, her mines, her forests 
and her railways. The effect was quickly seen. The 
surplus of unemployed labor was turned into a scarcity 
of skilled workingmen, wages and prices rapidly ad- 
vanced, speculation in "war babies" was rampant, 
huge fortunes were made overnight and a new crop of 
millionaires blossomed; America was enjoying pros- 
perity such as before she had never known. To de- 
part slightly from chronology and anticipate events, 
from early in 1915 and throughout the whole of 1916 
America played in the Pactolian sands. England, 
France and Russia, and later Italy, were not only 
buying in the United States but also borrowing, en- 
riching bankers with handsome commissions and 
paying heavy interest for the money advanced, which 
was used not to pay their own nationals but paid to 
American manufacturers and workingmen for mu- 
nitions and supplies ; and when they had drained 
themselves of their gold they sent back to the United 
States American stocks and bonds, either to be sold 
or to be used as collateral to sustain their credit. 
From being a debtor nation at the beginning of the war 
the whole world was now creditor to the United States. 



THE EVANGELIST 17!) 

Never perhaps had there been such extravagance, 
sucli hixury, such hivish expenditure, such Hght- 
heartedness, sucli a feverish craving for amusement. 
The pubHc was obsessed with the craze for enjoy- 
ment in the ghire of pubhcity and measured pleasure 
by its cost. In all the large cities the cabaret and the 
expensive and garish restaurant, with dancing as 
much a matter of course as the food, were nightly 
crowded until the early hours of the morning, and as 
the evenings were not long enough to satisfy the 
dancing mania, tea dances were introduced and be- 
came equall}^ the fashion. Women accustomed to 
pay extravagantly for dresses and furs were aghast 
at the prices now asked, but they paid without ques- 
tion, for money was plentiful and must be spent. In 
some of the large Western cities at Christmas, alw^ays 
a time when the pocketbook is freely opened, jewelers 
advertised lavishl}^ that "this is a diamond year" 
and "now is the time to buy jewelrj^", and the public 
spent fabulous sums for jewels and other presents. 
The opera and the theaters were never so well patron- 
ized. At no time had the rich and the fashionable 
entertained so freely, or with so little restraint indulged 
their caprices or taste in providing their friends costly 
food and drink. Nor was it only the idle rich and 
the fashionable of the large cities, always a class by 
themselves, who went this pace. They set the pace, 
it is true, but all classes of society were quick to imi- 
tate them. The normally staid and dull middle-aged 



180 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

man of the middle class learned to dance and took 
his feverish pleasure at the less^^pretentious cabaret, 
the pert little stenographer and her "boy" danced 
like all the rest of them ; the munition workers of the 
great industrial centers, making extraordinarily high 
wages, were buying expensive clothes and having 
luxuries hitlierto longed for but never believed possible 
to be possessed; the Western farmer, with a market 
practically at his own price for wheat and horses 
and cattle, was rich as never before ; the cotton planter 
of the South in a few months went from poverty to 
affluence. In every part of the country the same 
story was repeated ; money was being made quickly 
and spent freely. 

Indifferent as Americans might be to the war they 
were not indifferent to what the war meant to them. 
So long as the war lasted money must come to America, 
whose great profits would continue if America remained 
neutral, but the position would be changed if she 
abandoned her neutrality and became a belligerent. 
Distinctly then the war was very much a matter of 
business, and it would be folly, it would show very 
poor business sense, to dam up the golden stream by 
taking part in a war in Europe whose outcome could 
not in any way touch America. AVliether Germany 
won or was defeated America would not be affected. 
The only statesmanship the public understood was 
peace with war profits. 



THE EVANGELIST 181 

2 

Mr. Wilson was now to become the evangelist. He 
was to have the whole world as his congregation. He 
was to be sneered at, derided, defamed, but he was 
not to be swerved. He entered now upon a new phase 
of his career, more striking than any previous period 
of his life. He went about preaching his new gospel ; 
he began deliberately to preacji the doctrine of moral- 
ity, his words often falling on negligent ears, but to 
preach it without avowing his purpose, rather, in fact, 
trying to conceal it; by indirection to convey sug- 
gestion ; to lead by precept rather than by argu- 
ment; to repeat and constantly to repeat the same 
theme, frequently to weary his audience by his per- 
sistence, but by his singleness of design to provoke 
discussion, to stir sluggish thought, to force his ad- 
herents to defense and to invite the attack of his 
opponents ; but always to compel the people, uncon- 
sciously, often unwillingly, to question the moral mean- 
ing of the war, and thus to make them see, as he in- 
tended they should see, the war in a new aspect. 

He became the greatest propagandist the modern 
world has known, displaying extraordinary skill and 
dexterity and cunning, using that word not in its 
corrupted acceptance but in its original meaning. 
He was a gentle zealot ; with words of love and for- 
bearance on his lips he came to bring peace and com- 
fort and not to unloose the flaming sword. There 
was no fire in his words, rarely flights of eloquence in 



182 WOODROW ^\^LSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

what he said. He spoke with simplicity and direct- 
ness, using only the short and everyday words that 
every great teacher and leader of men has known 
how to use so that a profound thought or a great 
moral precept can be made sensible to men of little 
intelligence. His language was the plain speech of 
the masses, but it was like steel striking on steel in a 
vaulted chamber, to echo and reverberate and fill the 
lambent air with the beating pulses of a note that 
was quiet but never silent. 

Between the day of the sinking of the Lusitania 
and the day he went before Congress to ask for a 
declaration of war against Germany Mr. Wilson de- 
livered many addresses, some of them seemingly re- 
mote from the war and having no connection with it, 
but whenever he spoke he appealed to the American 
people to cast selfishness aside and with no expecta- 
tion of reward and only the consciousness of service 
as their reward help to bind the wounds of a stricken 
world. The limitations of space will permit only a 
few brief quotations taken at random, but these are 
suflBcient to show how Mr. Wilson was molding Ameri- 
can thought and making it impossible for Americans 
to avoid thinking about the one subject from which 
there could be no escape. Thus in an address at 
Indianapolis on January 8, 1915, he said: "May we 
not look forward to the time when we shall be called 
blessed among the nations because we succored the 
nations of the world in their time of distress and dis- 



THE EVANGELIST IS.'J 

may? I for one pray God that that solemn hour 
may come, and I know the solidity of character, and 
I know the exaltation of hope, I know the high prin- 
ciple with which the American people will respond to 
the call of the world for this service, and I thank 
God that those who believe in Americ^i, who try to 
serve her people, are likely to be also what America 
herself from the first intended to be, the servant of 
mankind." In a brief address to the Methodist 
Episcopal Conference in Washington on March 25, 
1915, tlie President said : "So I look upon you in the 
present circumstances as a great part of the stabilizer 
of the nation." Explaining the functions of the re- 
cently invented aeroplane stabilizer to determine the 
plane upon which the machine is to move, the Presi- 
dent said: "Something like that is the function of 
the great moral forces of the world — to act as stab- 
ilizers even when we go up in the air. . . . The Pres- 
ident is what the American nation sustains, and if it 
does not sustain him, then his power is contemptible 
and insignificant. If I can speak for you and rep- 
resent you and in some sense hand on the moral forces 
that you represent, then I am indeed powerful ; if 
I cannot, then I am indeed weak. . . . This is a coun- 
cil of peace, not to form plans of peace, for it is not our 
privilege to form such, but to proclaim the single su- 
preme plan of peace, the relation of our Lord and 
Saviour, Jesus Christ." 

Mr. Wilson had publicly proclaimed his spiritual 



184 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

guidance. It was not the first time that he had in- 
voked the favor of the Ahnighty, and more than once 
it had been asked whether to Mr. Wilson rehgion was 
simply a conventionality or part of his life. Men 
who know him best and have been given opportuni- 
ties to form a judgment, say that Mr. Wilson is deeply 
religious. He is, says one observer, a Scotch Presby- 
terian, a Cromwellian, but with none of the austerity 
of the Covenanter ; in him the fanaticism of his for- 
bears has been softened and made gentle ; he sees 
that existence is a perfectly ordered scheme. Less 
concerned about dogma or doctrine than the true 
spirit of Christianity, for between life and doctrine, 
Mr. Wilson said in one of his addresses, there is no real 
antithesis; a man "lives upon a doctrine, upon a 
principle, upon an idea"; unconcerned about creeds 
and tolerant of formuhiries, the Supreme Being is not 
terrible and vengeful, always demanding retribution, 
but a loving Father, kind, forbearing, generous. Mr. 
Wilson, says this same observer, is that rare person in 
politics whose existence has often been denied, a 
Christian and a gentleman ; and he adds another in- 
timate touch worth recording. Mr. AVilson is, what 
few persons imagine, a shy man, sensitive to the ex- 
treme, and it is this shyness and sensitiveness that 
have given him his undeserved reputation for cold- 
ness and aloofness, in delighting to keep the public 
at arm's length and neither desiring nor making friends. 
It is not that he is unresponsive, but he has the timid- 



THE EV.VNGELIST 185 

ity of the shy, almost diilideiit man who must always 
struggle against his reserve and is constitutionally 
incapable of letting his real feelings or emotions be 
seen except by the very few enjoying a peculiarly 
intimate association. 

When in April, 1914, Mr. Wilson determined that 
he had no alternative except to seize Vera Cruz he 
called a meeting of his Cabinet. In efifect he was 
about to make war on Mexico, and although it would 
have been a petty war as the world to-day has been 
taught war, then it loomed large as war; the step 
Mr. Wilson was about to take was portentous and 
its solemnity impressed him. Having explained what 
he proposed to do, he said to the men sitting around 
the table, with quiet earnestness and with a sincerity 
no one could doubt, that if any of them still believed 
in the eflBcacy of prayer he hoped they would think 
very solemnly over this matter. Probably the only 
member of the Cabinet who was not startled was Mr. 
Bryan, who always consistently endeavored to shape 
his life according to the teachings of his Master, but 
to the other members, more worldly although religious, 
this dramatic reminder, but without a suggestion of 
theatricalism, that man was merely an instrument 
in the hands of God, produced a profound impression 
and convinced them that the President had not taken 
this momentous decision without having first narrowly 
searched his conscience, and his spirit had been strength- 
ened by the conviction he was committing no trespass. 



186 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

3 

On the eighth of April, 1915, Mr. Wilson welcomed 
the annual Conference of the Maryland Methodist 
Protestant Church assembled in Washington, and 
although his address was extremely brief, he struck 
even a deeper note than in his address before the 
Methodist Episcopal Conference. It would seem, he 
said, as if great, blind material forces had been re- 
leased which had long been held in restraint, and yet 
underneath could be seen the strong impulses of great 
ideals. It would be impossible for men to go through 
what men are going through on the great battlefields 
of Europe and struggle through the present dark night 
of their terrible struggle if it were not that they saw, 
or thought that they saw, the broadening of light 
where the morning should come up and believed that 
they were standing each on his side of the contest for 
some eternal i)rinciple of right. 

" Then all about them, all about us, there sits the 
silent, waiting tribunal which i^ going to utter the 
ultimate judgment upon this struggle, the great tri- 
bunal of the opinion of the world ; and I fancy that 
I see, I hope that I see, I pray that it may be that I 
do truly see, great spiritual forces lying waiting for 
the outcome of this thing to assert themselves, and 
asserting themselves even now, to enlighten our judg- 
ment and steady our spirits." We wish to see certain 
things triumph, the President said, but why do we 
wish to see them triumph, and what is there in them 



THE EVANGELIST 187 

for the lasting benefit of mankind? "For wc are 
not in tills world to amuse ourselves with its af- 
fairs. We are here to push the whole sluggish mass 
forward in some particular direction, and unless you 
know the direction in which you want to go your force 
is of no avail. 

"Do you love righteousness.'' is what each one of 
us ought to ask himself, and if you love righteousness, 
are you ready to translate righteousness into action 
and be ashamed and afraid before no man.'* It seems 
to me, therefore, that it is worth suggesting to you 
that you are not sitting here merely to transact the 
business and express the ideals of a great church, as 
represented in the State of Maryland, but you are 
here also as part of the assize of humanity, to remind 
yourselves of the things that are permanent and 
eternal which, if we do not translate into action, we 
have failed in the fundamental things of our lives." 

At Arlington Cemetery, on May 31, 1915, the Pres- 
ident said: "We live in our visions. We live in the 
things that we see. We live, and the hope abounds 
in us as we live, in the things that we purpose. Let 
us go away from this place renewed in our devotion to 
daily duty and to those ideals which keep a nation 
young, keep it noble, keep it rich in enterprise and 
achievement ; make it to lead the nations of the 
world in those things that make for hope and for the 
benefit of mankind." 

Speaking at the Annual Encampment of the Grand 



188 WOODROW WTLSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Army of the Republic, in Washington, on September 
28, 1915, Mr. Wilson said: "But for my own part I 
would not be proud of the extraordinary physical de- 
velopment of this country, of its extraordinary de- 
velopment in material wealth and financial power, did 
I not believe that the people of the United States 
wished all of this power devoted to ideal ends. There 
have been other nations as rich as we; there have 
been other nations as powerful ; there have been 
other nations as spirited; but I hope that we shall 
never forget that we created this nation, not to serve 
ourselves but to serve mankind." 

Twice during 1915 Mr. Wilson addressed in Wash- 
ington the Daughters of the American Revolution. 
On the first occasion, April 19, he said, "We are in- 
terested in the United States, politically speaking, in 
nothing but human liberty." Warning his audience 
against forming judgment based on impulse or preju- 
dice, the President continued: "We cannot afford 
to sympathize with anybody or anything except the 
passing generations of human beings. America for- 
gets what she was born for when she does exactly the 
way every other nation does — when she loses her 
recollection of her main object, as sometimes nations 
do and sometimes perhaps she herself has done, in 
pursuing some immediate and transitory object. . . . 
I ask you to rally to the cause which is dearer in my 
estimation than any other cause, and that is the 
cause of righteousness as ministered to by those who 



THE EVANGELIST 189 

hokl Uicir minds quiet aiul judge according to prin- 
ciple. . . . We should ultimately wish to be justified 
by our own consciences and by the standards of our 
own national life." 

On the second time, on October 11, 1915, Mr. Wilson 
said: "Neutrality is a negative word. It is a word 
that does not express what America ought to feel. 
America has a heart, and that heart throbs with all 
sorts of intense sympathies, but America has schooled 
its heart to love the things that America believes in, 
and it ought to devote itself only to the things that 
America believes in, and, believing that America 
stands apart in its ideals, it ought not to allow itself 
to be drawn, so far as its heart is concerned, into any- 
body's quarrel. Not because it does not understand 
the quarrel, not because it does not in its head assess 
the merits of the controversy, but because America 
has promised the world to stand apart and maintain 
certain principles of action which are grounded in law 
and justice. We are not trying to keep out of trouble ; 
we are trying to preserve the foundations upon which 
peace can be rebuilt. Peace can be rebuilt only upon 
the ancient and accepted principles of international 
law, only upon the things which remind nations of 
their duties to each other, and deeper than that, of 
their duties to mankind and humanity. 

"America has a great cause which is not confined to 
the American continent. It is the cause of humanity 
itself. I do not mean in anything I say even to imply 



190 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

a judgment upon any nation or upon any policy, for 
my object here this afternoon is not to sit in judgment 
upon anybody but ourselves as to challenge you to 
assist all of us who are trying to make America con- 
scious of nothing so much as her own principles and 
duty." 

"The extraordinary circumstances of such a time 
have done much to quicken our national consciousness 
and deepen and confirm our confidence in the prin- 
ciples of peace and freedom by which we have always 
sought to be guided," Thanksgiving Proclamation, 
1915. 

At Columbus, Ohio, on December 10, 1915, the 
President said: "I believe that thoughtful men of 
every country and of every sort will insist that, when 
we get peace again, we shall have guarantees that it 
will remain, and that the instrumentalities of justice 
will be exalted above the instrumentalities of force. 
I believe that ... if America preserves her poise, 
preserves her self-possession, preserves her attitude of 
friendliness toward all the world, she may have the 
privilege, whether in one form or another, of being the 
mediating influence by which these things may be 
induced." 

At the Manhattan Club, New York City, on No- 
vember 4, 1915, the President said: "We shall, I 
confidently believe, never again take another foot of 
territory by conquest. We shall never in any cir- 
cumstances seek to make an independent people sub- 



THE EVANGELIST 191 

ject to our dominion ; because we believe, we pas- 
sionately believe, in the right of every people to choose 
their own allegiance and be free of masters altogether. 
. . . The mission of America in the world is essen- 
tialh' a mission of peace and good will among men." 

In New York, May 17, 1915: "The interesting and 
inspiring thing about America is that she asks noth- 
ing for herself except what she has a right to ask for 
humanity itself. It is not pretension on our part to 
say that we are privileged to stand for what every 
nation would wish to stand for and speaking for those 
things which all humanity must desire . . . solemn 
evidence that the force of America is the force of moral 
principle, that there is not anything else that she 
loves and that there is not anything else for which she 
will contend." 

Before the Associated Press in New York, on April 
20, 1915, Mr. Wilson elaborated the position of and 
the duty imposed upon his country. "We have roll- 
ing between us and those bitter days across the water 
three thousand miles of cool and silent ocean. Our 
atmosphere is not yet charged with those disturbing 
elements which must be felt and must permeate every 
nation of Europe. Therefore, is it not likely that the 
nations of the world will some day turn to us for the 
cooler assessment of the elements engaged.'*" Dis- 
claiming any intention to sit in judgment, because 
no nation is fit to sit in judgment on any other, the 
time must inevitably come when "we shall some 



192 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

day have to assist in reconstructing the processes of 
peace." The position of America made her more 
and more the mediating nation of the world, "and we 
must have our judgments prepared and our spirits 
chastened against the coming of that day." The 
duty of America was "to think of America before we 
think of Europe, in order that America may be fit to 
be Europe's friend when the day of tested friend- 
ship comes. The test of friendship is not now sympa- 
thy with the one side or the other, but getting ready 
to help both sides when the struggle is over." 

The basis of neutrality as Mr. Wilson defined it 
"is not indifference; it is not self-interest. The 
basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind. It is 
fairness, it is good will at bottom. It is impartiality 
of spirit and of judgment. ... I am interested in 
neutrality because there is something so much greater 
to do than fight, because there is something, there is 
a distinction waiting for this nation that no nation 
has ever yet got. That is the distinction of absolute 
self-control and self-mastery. ... I covet for America 
this splendid courage of reserve moral force. . . . We 
are trustees for what I venture to say is the greatest 
heritage that any nation ever had, the love of justice 
and righteousness and human liberty. For, funda- 
mentally, these are the things to which America is 
addicted and to which she is devoted." 

"There marches that great host which has brought 
us to the present day ; the host that has never forgot- 



THE EVANGELIST 193 

ten the vision which it saw at tlic birth of the nation ; 
the host which always responds to the dictates of 
humanity and of Hberty." "Fhig Day", Washing- 
ton, June 14, 1915, 

"America is great in the world, not as she is a suc- 
cessful government merely, but as she is the successful 
embodiment of a great ideal of unselfish citizenship. 
That is what makes the world feel America draw it 
like a lodestone. . . . That is the light that shines 
from America. God grant that it may always shine." 
Speech before the Federal Council of Churches of 
Christ in America, at Columbus, Ohio, December 11, 
1915. 

4 

The accusation of inconsistency has frequently been 
brought against Mr. Wilson ; he has been charged 
with holding principles so lightly that they yield 
easily to the pressure of popular demand ; that, in 
short, statesmanship, as he views it, is opportunism 
reduced to a science. Opportunism, in its larger 
sense, can be base and disgraceful, or it can be the 
rarest self-control and the wisest statesmanship. One 
of his biographers has said of Lincoln that it is cer- 
tain he trained himself to be a great student of the 
fitting opportunity. Whether Mr. Wilson consciously, 
with deliberate intent, trained himself with a similar 
purpose it is impossible to say, but his whole public 
life is proof that he knew when and how to use his 



194 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

opportunity to accomplish a great purpose, and that 
his seeming inconsistency, of which we have more than 
one instance, was intellectual pliability, the honesty 
and courage to admit an error and to feel no shame 
in candidly confessing it. 

When Congress met in December, 1914, the war 
then having been waging for four months, many men 
were seriously disturbed about the defenseless posi- 
tion of the United States and believed national secur- 
ity demanded that immediate action be taken to 
increase the military and naval forces, which had the 
vigorous support of some of the most influential news- 
papers of the country. Addressing Congress on the 
eighth of December, Mr. Wilson, then not desiring 
to give any encouragement to the thought of America 
being in danger of becoming a belligerent, with as near 
a display of heat as he had shown in any of his utter- 
ances up to that time, forcibly denied that military 
preparation was necessary or that the slightest danger 
confronted America. Frankly admitting that the 
country was not prepared for war and that if it were 
necessary to resist attack the means would be found 
without compulsory military service, he said : 

"Allow me to speak with great plainness and direct- 
ness upon this great matter and to avow my con- 
victions with deep earnestness. I have tried to know 
what America is, what her people think, what they 
are, what they most cherish and hold dear. I hope 
that some of their finer passions are in my own heart, 



THE EVANGELIST 195 

— some of the great conceptions and desires which 
gave birth to this Government and which have made 
the voice of this people a voice of peace and hope and 
Hberty among the peoples of the world, and that, 
speaking my own thoughts, I shall, at least in part, 
speak theirs also, however faintly and inadequately, 
upon this vital matter. 

*'We are at peace with all the world. No one who 
speaks counsel based on fact or drawn from a just and 
candid interpretation of realities can say that there is 
reason to fear that from any quarter our independence 
or the integrity of our territory is threatened. Dread 
of the power of any other nation we are incapable of. 
We are not jealous of rivalry in the fields of commerce 
or of any other peaceful achievement. We mean to 
live our own lives as we will ; but we mean also to 
let live. We are, indeed, a true friend of all the na- 
tions of the w^orld, because we threaten none, covet 
the possessions of none, desire the overthrow of none. 
Our friendship can be accepted and is accepted with- 
out reservation, because it is offered in a spirit and 
for a purpose which no one need ever question or sus- 
pect. Therein lies our greatness. We are the cham- 
pions of peace and of concord. And we should be very 
jealous of this distinction which we have sought to 
earn. Just now we should be particularly jealous of 
it, because it is our dearest present hope that this char- 
acter and reputation may presently, in God's provi- 
dence, bring us an opportunity such as has seldom 



196 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

been vouchsafed any nation, to counsel and obtain 
peace in the world and reconciliation and healing 
settlement of many a matter that has cooled and in- 
terrupted the friendship of nations. This is the time 
above all others when we should wish and resolve 
to keep our strength by self-possession, our influence 
by preserving our ancient principles of action." 

The traditional military policy of America was to 
rely upon its militia, its citizen soldiery ; more than 
that would be a reversal of the whole history and 
character of American policy. To do more than that, 
Mr. Wilson asserted, would mean "that we had lost 
our self-possession, that we had been thrown off our 
balance by a war with which we have nothing to do, 
whose causes cannot touch us, whose very existence 
affords us opportunities of friendship and disinterested 
service which should make us ashamed of any thought 
of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble." A 
powerful navy America had always had and would 
continue to have, "but who shall tell us what sort 
of navy to build?" Mr. Wilson asked, and when will 
the experts be right .^^ 

The policy of America, Mr. Wilson said in conclu- 
sion, "will not be for an occasion. It will be con- 
ceived as a permanent and settled thing, which we 
will pursue at all seasons, without haste and after a 
fashion perfectly consistent with the peace of the world, 
the abiding friendship of States, and the unhampered 
freedom of all with whom we have to deal. Let there 



THE EVANGELIST l!)7 

be no niisconcepiion. Tlie couiUry has boon niisiii- 
formod. We hiive not been negligent of national de- 
fense. We are not unmindful of the great responsibility 
resting upon us. We shall leani and j)rofil by the 
lesson of every experience and every new circumstance ; 
and what is needed will be adequately done." 

Yet fourteen months later he was to recant, publicly 
and without qualification, making no attempt to 
soften his abjuration but honestly admitting he had 
been mistaken and was now anxious to make profes- 
sion of his repentance. Addressing the Railway 
Business Association in New York, on January 27, 
1916, Mr. Wilson insisted that America desired above 
all things peace and that he shared that profound 
love for peace. "I have sought to maintain peace 
against very great and sometimes very unfair odds. 
I have had many a time to use every power that was 
in me to prevent such a catastrophe as war coming 
upon this country," but the conditions required that 
consideration be given to defense, and he added : 
"Perhaps when you learned, as I dare say you did 
learn beforehand, that I was expecting to address 
you on the subject of preparedness, you recalled the 
address which I made to Congress something more 
than a year ago, in which I said that this question 
of military preparedness was not a pressing question. 
But more than a year has gone by since then, and T 
would be ashamed if I had not learned something in 
fourteen months. The minute I stop changing my 



198 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

mind with the change of all the circumstances of the 
world, I will be a back number." 

Having thus handsomely confessed his error Mr. 
Wilson took the public still further into his confidence 
and explained why he had reversed himself in an- 
other matter. The Republicans had agitated the 
creation of a Commission of experts to study the tariff 
so as to take the tariff out of politics, but Mr. Wilson 
had opposed this. He told his audience: "There is 
another thing about which I have changed my mind. 
A year ago I was not in favor of a tariff board, and I 
will tell you why." At that time, he said, the only 
purpose of the tariff board was to keep alive an un- 
profitable controversy and to disturb business, but now 
there was going on in the world an economic revolu- 
tion : no man had the elements of that revolution 
clearly in his mind, and the business of legislation with 
regard to international trade could not be undertaken 
until the facts were known, which was a study prop- 
erly to be made by experts. The Republicans hailed 
this volte face with cynical delight and, to use Mr. 
Wilson's own phrase, as "there is a great deal more 
opinion vocal in this world than is consistent with 
logic", satirically suggested they w^ould gladly furnish 
their opponents with the ideas of which they were 
barren. Mr. Wilson was not unduly disturbed. To 
him consistency was less important than circum- 
stance. 



THE EVANGELIST 199 



Mr. Wilson was going Ihrougli an evolution, forced 
by circumstance. He was meeting his opportunity 
as strong men do, strong enough to keep an oj)en mind, 
without pride of opinion to see events in their reality 
and understand their meaning. He was able now to 
see the war in a new aspect, that whatever it might 
have been at the beginning and whatever its causes 
were at the outset, it had ceased to be a war between 
nations but had now become another phase of the 
age-long struggle between liberty and despotism, be- 
tween freedom and slavery, between progress and 
reaction. In an address made at the banquet of the 
League to Enforce Peace, in Washington on May 27, 
1916, Mr. Wilson said of the war: "With its causes 
and its objects we are not concerned. The obscure 
fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst 
forth we are not interested to search for or explore," 
and it was another of those phrases that perhaps would 
have been as well left unsaid, or if it must be said 
to have been amplified. To the public it seemed cal- 
lous that the President should say America was not 
concerned in the causes of the war, and the President 
was criticized for saying it, because at that time the 
causes of the war, that is to say, its responsibility, was 
discussed with fierce zeal by the partisans of the 
Allies and Germany. If Germany provoked the war 
and was the wrongdoer, surely no American could be 
in sympathy with Germany; but if Germany was not 



200 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the aggressor, if her opponents were equally determined 
on war, then neither side could expect American sym- 
pathy on the ground of resisting unwarranted attack. 
To Mr. Wilson this argument was futile. It was 
labor wasted in flogging a dead horse. To search the 
past, to rake over the bones of history long crumbled 
to dust was idle, it might amuse children but was 
no occupation for grown men. What was clear to 
Mr. Wilson, what ought to be equally clear to his 
audience, as he believed, was not to spend time in seek- 
ing the original causes of the war but to understand the 
great cause that the war had become. That was the 
all-important and all-sufficient thing, because when 
men understood not what brought on the war but 
that the war was to vindicate morality and save the 
world, America would no longer doubt. The more 
one understands the way in which Mr. Wilson's mind 
works, the more closely he is studied, the more logical 
he reveals himself. With an engaging frankness that 
is rare in public men, Mr. Wilson constantly throws 
a light upon himself and takes the public into his 
confidence, if they have the intelligence to understand 
the significance of an almost parenthetical sentence. 
Thus in his speech at the Metropolitan Opera House 
in New York, on September 27, 1918, he said : *'I have 
responded gladly and with a resolution that has grown 
warmer and more confident as the issues have grown 
clearer and clearer." Amplify the thought back of the 
words and it would be that at one time the remote causes 



THE EVANGELIST 201 

of the war were obscure and Ihey did iiol loucli ]Mr. 
Wilson, but as that obscurity lilted and the issues stood 
forth terrible in what they threatened, majestic in what 
they offered, they appealed so irresistibly to him that 
he not only made them his own but became their 
champion. 

Mr. Wilson, to return to midsummer of 1915, had 
not become a militant, but he was ceasing to be a 
pacifist, he was taking a new view of force, because in 
a world rent asunder by war he had the wisdom to see 
that the nation unarmed was in peril. He had sources 
of information denied the public, but what he knew 
could not be revealed, and his knowledge caused him 
constant anxiety. In his speech before the Railway 
Business Association he said, "I cannot tell you what 
the international relations of this country will be to- 
morrow, and I use the word literally ; and I would not 
dare to keep silent and let the country suppose that 
to-morrow was certain to be as bright as to-day." More 
than once about this time he used similar language 
and showed the fear that lay heavy upon him. The 
policy of Germany, her utter disregard of neutral 
rights, her violation of international law, her manifold 
and revolting crimes, the contempt with which the 
German Government treated America and either 
sneered at American remonstrance or attempted to 
bully, caused Mr. Wilson to fear the time must come 
when it would be impossible to maintain neutrality. 
His patience was sorely taxed, yet the more he was 



202 WOODROW >VILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

challenged, the greater the provocation, the more 
resolutely he labored to prevent war so that all Amer- 
icans should "draw together for the successful prose- 
cution of peace", a distinction, he said, "I covet for 
America." But he still had to meet the same diffi- 
culty that had faced him from the outset. Sentiment 
was undoubtedly turning against Germany; in the 
Atlantic deeps the Lusitania was a shrine to which the 
thoughts of Americans turned in loving pity or glow- 
ing resentment that flamed anew at the report of every 
fresh German atrocity ; the cries of the victims of 
German lust clutched at America's heart ; but Amer- 
ica still remained spiritually divided, in thought two 
nations ; the demand for war was opposed by the 
demand for peace; selfishness, ignorance and coward- 
ice had not been eradicated ; and millions of men 
and women, perverted by a strained construction of 
morality, soothed their consciences by no longer affect- 
ing neutrality, — even they felt the shame of pre- 
tended indifference in the presence of a world crucified, 
— but cloaked self-interest and prejudice in pretended 
patriotism, and vociferously declared themselves to be 
"not pro-Ally or pro-German, but pro-American." 

Mr. Wilson had not succeeded in converting his 
countrymen, but the seeds of conversion were sown, 
and in the fullness of time would come to a rich har- 
vest. Had Mr. Wilson died in 1915 or been defeated 
in the following year, history, blind to aspiration and 
recording only achievement, would have judged him 



THE EVANGELIST 208 

not by aspiration but by accomplishment, not by what 
lie had hoped to do but by what he had failed to do; 
and history would have written the verdict, seemingly 
a just one, that as a statesman he utterly failed, that 
given an opportunity such as had been given to few 
men, certainly to no other American President, he 
was unable to grasp it because of temperamental or 
other deficiencies. 

In those two years and until Mr. Wilson led the 
country to war superficial judgment would have said 
that pursuing the policy of timidity, endeavoring to 
displease no one and to retain the good will of every 
one, he suffered the usual fate of the man who attempts 
to ride two horses. Apparently he had alienated his 
friends and made his opponents still more embittered ; 
men who were neither friends nor enemies but who 
were tolerant and disposed to give him the benefit of 
every doubt were puzzled and disturbed. His posi- 
tion was peculiar, unlike that of any modern head of 
a state or the leader of a great political party. 

His course had given great offense. The Germanic 
party, meaning by that the Germans of Germany and 
the Germans in America as well as their avowed and 
secret supporters and sympathizers, were more con- 
vinced than ever that Mr. Wilson's' official neutrality 
simply concealed his Ally sympathies; tliat profess- 
ing friendship for all the world and perpetually talk- 
ing peace, secretly he detested Germany and had 
friendship only for the Allies. The Germanic party 



204 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

hated Mr. Wilson and constantly intrigued against 
him. 

The Allies, both in their own countries and in 
America, and their adherents and champions, no less 
bitterly disliked him. He balanced too nicely. He 
paltered with Germany and he nagged England. 
Germany murdered and he protested ; England opened 
the mails and he threatened. He preached humanity, 
but to the plea of humanity in its distress he was deaf. 
The world was dying, and the only consolation he 
could offer were the measured, words of a peaceful 
America making cerements for a dead world. 

It has often been a disputable question whether 
public opinion in America is formed by the relatively 
small intellectual class at the top which influences the 
great mass below, or whether the mass is the force 
that creates what the intellectuals formulate. That 
question need not be further pursued, but it is quite 
certain that in America from 1914 to the beginning 
of 1917 the intellectuals, the editors of newspapers, 
every man who by voice or pen was able to influence 
the thought of his fellow man in the interest of the 
Allies, saw in Mr. Wilson's course only cowardice, and 
to them delay was dishonesty. Intellect does not 
suffer gladly to be told what it knows, it is intolerant 
of unnecessary information and resents its infliction. 
Mr, Wilson's iteration and reiteration of duty, hu- 
manity, peace, liberty, altruism, service, to them 
these were words merely, high-sounding but empty 



THE EVANGELIST 205 

words, words to tickle the cars of tlic mass because 
they sounded well but had no meaning. To the in- 
tellectuals the causes of the war were no more obscure 
than the duty of the United States was in doubt; 
right and justice were so plain they needed no guide, 
but what they failed to take into consideration was the 
sluggish mind of the mass. The mass still remained in 
ignorance, its only interest in the war still remained 
that of self-interest; the moral meaning of the war 
was beyond them. The mass had to be patiently told 
and taught ; told and taught so often in the same 
words that at last they would be made to see. 

This is what Mr. Wilson was doing, slowly, it is 
true, but very surely. Every speech he made pro- 
voked excited discussion, and discussion, even if ex- 
cited and angry and often ignorant and malicious, 
was education. You cannot keep on talking about 
moraUty, and have newspapers and public men 
ridicule morality, without the people beginning to 
question the meaning of morality and to ask what 
concern they have in international morality. Mr. Wil- 
son, it was said, uttered nothing but pretty platitudes, 
he floated in the higher realms of idealism, he was 
vague and academic; but to stagnant thought he 
gave an impulse. He was doing in his own way and 
to meet the requirements of the American temper- 
ament what Peter the Hermit did when he preached 
his crusade, what men in every age and every tongue 
have done who placed themselves at the head of a 



206 WOODROW AVILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

great movement to bring the mass against their will 
to see the beauty of life redeemed by sacrifice and 
devotion to a principle. What he said could not be 
drowned by ridicule or dismissed lightly or be forgot- 
ten, because subconsciously it stirred the spirit and 
set a chord vibrating. The American is a composite 
of altruism and materialism, of idealism and the 
practical, of balance and emotion, as responsive as 
the tuning fork to the note. Avid for pleasure and 
feverish in its pursuit, men and women were thinking ; 
they were dissatisfied, angry, impatient, as much with 
themselves as with Mr. Wilson because he pricked 
conscience; they felt something stirring within them, 
they were irritated because the thing would not be 
quiet, but they were thinking. That much Mr. 
Wilson had done. He made them think. 

They would perhaps have thought more vocally, 
and perhaps instead of thinking they would have 
been simply vocal, had Mr. Wilson been a man of 
passion who fired men with his own heat. In one of 
his speeches Mr. Wilson said three thousand miles 
of "cool and silent ocean" separated America from 
Europe, and to many Americans Mr. Wilson was as 
cool and unruffled as the measureless ocean. Wliat 
men longed for was a leader who blazed, who at times 
flamed with the righteous wrath that ought to have 
consumed him, who, if for a moment only, would cast 
aside the armor of office and reveal himself a human 
being, willing to do a wrong in a righteous cause. 



THE EVANGELIST 207 

They wanted evidence, palpal )le, substantial, obvious, 
that the man was human and not simply an intellect, 
they would have rejoiced had his brain unleashed his 
heart and cold calculation given place to I lie fine and 
generous emotion to make him disregard consequences 
for the sake of right. But he was, to his fellow men, 
too well regulated, too much a master of himself, too 
well disciplined to give way to the honest passions 
that lend a dignity to ordinary men. 

Mr. Wilson now, as had happened before and was to 
happen again, was misunderstood, and the qualities 
that ought to have won him the admiration of his 
countrymen were used to his disadvantage. It was 
not a tepid disposition and the over-refinement of cal- 
culation that held him back and made him master of 
himself, it was the quality of greatness that made him 
patient and able to resist desire and be content to wait 
until the moment came to strike. Mr. Wilson had been 
deeply moved by the crimes of Germany and felt the 
same indignation that every other humane and civilized 
person did, but he would not permit his personal 
feelings to sway his official actions. The gossip that 
clusters about a President, much of it trivial and some 
of it valuable as a revelation of character and often 
more important than posthumous judgment, Mr. Wil- 
son, as it has been previously remarked, has escaped, 
but one incident, the authenticity of which is estab- 
lished, is interesting as showing how little the Amer- 
ican people really understood their President. 



208 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

It was a tacit agreement among the members of the 
President's family that while they were privileged to 
discuss the war among themselves they would not 
discuss it in his presence. Entering a room one day 
in which members of the family were seated, the lively 
conversation as the door opened was followed by an 
embarrassed silence. Mr. Wilson looked at the group 
quizzically and said: "I know what you were talking 
about; you were talking about the war. In five 
minutes I could get just as excited as all the rest of 
you, but that's one reason why one person at least 
must keep his head and remain sane." 

6 

Beginning in the end of 1915 and in the early 
months of the following year Mr. Wilson made many 
speeches similar to that he delivered before the Rail- 
way Business Association advocating an adequate 
army and navy. Mr. Wilson had not wavered in his 
conviction that the United States ought to remain 
neutral, that as a neutral she could be of greater 
service to mankind than as a belligerent, that, as 
he said in the third annual address to Congress 
on December 7, 1915: "It was necessary, if a uni- 
versal catastrophe was to be avoided, that a limit 
should be set to the sweep of destructive war and 
that some part of the great family of nations 
should keep the processes of peace alive, if only 
to prevent collective economic ruin and the break- 



THE EVANGELIST 20!) 

down tliroiighoiil I he world of the industries 
by which its populations are fed and sustained"; 
but circumstance was again compelling action. Ger- 
many had to be considered in the light of a foe, de- 
termined apparently to provoke the United States, 
and seemingly indifferent to what the United States 
might do. In all his speeches Mr. ^Yilson never 
omitted to stress the altruistic mission of the United 
States or the things for which she was striving, but he 
coupled with that the necessity of the country making 
itself ready to resist attack. Thus at Cleveland, 
Ohio, on January 29, 1916, he said — and this speech 
is typical of the others delivered at that time: "We 
are peculiar in this, that from the first we have dedi- 
cated our force to the service of justice and righteous- 
ness and peace ... do you not see that if I am to 
guard the honor of the nation, I am not protecting it 
against itself, for we are not going to do anything to 
stain the honor of our own country. I am protecting 
it against things that I cannot control, the action of 
others. And where the action of others may bring us 
I cannot foretell. You may count upon my heart 
and resolution to keep you out of the war, but you 
must be ready if it is necessary that I should main- 
tain your honor." In a word, Mr. Wilson was turning 
the thought of the country to realize that it might be 
forced to go to war. He was destroying the fatuous- 
ness which made so many Americans believe that 
come what might the United States was in no danger 



210 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

and by some mysterious providence could be spared 
the experience of every other nation ; that it was too 
formidable to be attacked and too powerful to need 
defense. War, he made men see, must now be re- 
garded not as a distant possibility but as something 
that an untoward event might any day bring very 
near ; but if war came it would be a war not for con- 
quest or aggression or to satisfy an unworthy ambi- 
tion, but in defense of honor and those ideals which 
America had always sustained. 

Still another motive moved Mr. Wilson. He had 
a Congress that was pacifist, that was cowed by the 
political strength of the Germanic party, too indif- 
ferent to national interests to dare the antagonism of 
the electorate hostile to Mr. W^ilson and the formidable 
peace-at-any-price voters. It is true there were many 
courageous and far-seeing men in Congress who, ir- 
respective of party or personal feelings, were ready 
loyally to support the President and carry through his 
recommendations, but it is also true, — and numerous 
votes proved it, — that in both parties were men 
either openly or covertly opposing legislation directed 
against Germany. Mr. Wilson knew that to reach 
these members of Congress he must first quicken the 
country, and one of his purposes in appealing to the 
people was to start a back fire. In every speech he 
told his audience, varying his words but not the sub- 
stance, that he knew of the necessities of the case but 
they must "stand back of the executive authorities of 



THE EVANGELIST 211 

the United States in urgin^j uj)on those wlio make our 
laws as early and effective action as possible." 

The year before had seen a vacancy created in the 
Cabinet by the enforced resignation of Mr. Bryan ; 
this year was to see another break when Mr. Garrison, 
on February 10, surrendered his portfolio as Secre- 
tary of War, owing to an irreconcilable conflict of 
opinion with the President regarding the method to 
increase the army. Mr. Garrison's force and character 
and his advocacy of a complete reorganization of the 
military establishment had favorably impressed the 
"big army" men as the first step toward the United 
States declaring war on Germany, but they saw in his 
resignation confirmation of their fears that the Presi- 
dent had no intention of making war. 



CHAPTER X 

America in the War 
1 

Mr. Wilson's renomination for the Presidency in 
1916 was a foregone conclusion, but his election 
was uncertain, and the possibility of defeat weighed 
heavily upon him. It was with no feeling of wounded 
personal ambition Mr. Wilson contemplated defeat, 
but he feared his half-finished work would be left un- 
completed, and he foresaw the diflSculties that would 
follow the election of a Republican President and the 
dangerous political situation that would be brought 
about. 

The Democratic majority in Congress was opposed 
to war. There were Democrats in both Houses who 
were openly for war, to whom Mr. Wilson's policy 
of restraint and caution was distasteful, who were no 
less impatient than the Republicans at Mr. Wilson's 
inaction and who in private were as critical as their 
opponents; but the party, as a whole, was satisfied 
with the policy of neutrality and determined vigorously 
to resist a declaration of war against Germany; on 
more than one occasion some of its members had 
attempted to secure the enactment of legislation in 

212 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 213 

the interest of German}^ and seriously detrimental 
to the Allies. It was only by the exercise of all his 
power as the party leader and the President that Mr. 
Wilson was able to defeat this attempted legislation, 
but his majority was always uncomfortably close. 

The Republicans had been bitterly critical of Mr. 
Wilson's Mexican policy, and while not explicitly 
demanding war against Mexico, they had judged Mr. 
Wilson guilty of incompetence and shamefully weak 
in his submission to Mexico ; and to them Mexico 
seemed to offer an issue to appeal to the country. 
They were now in the same position as their 
antagonists, they were not united for or against war; 
Republicans had voted with Democrats to secure 
the passage of the legislation which Mr. Wilson must 
at any cost prevent, but, speaking broadly, the 
Republicans were the war party, and it was a declara- 
tion of w^ar they w^anted against Germany, for in 1916 
the leaders of the Republican party were strongly 
pro-Ally. It would require too long and detailed an 
examination of American political and social conditions 
to explain this, and it would not in any way throw 
light on the character and work of Mr. Wilson ; but 
the result was the war had become a question of 
internal politics. Having made the war a political 
issue, the Republicans, if they came into power, 
would be committed to war against Germany, and the 
Democrats, opposed to war and smarting under 
defeat, looking upon the Republican championship 



214 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of war as merely a crafty political trick to win the 
election, would have offered a practically solid front 
against the dominant party's war measures. Perhaps 
the Democrats, in opposition, would not have gone 
to the extreme lengths of preventing war, and war, 
as we know now but, with the possible exception of 
Mr. Wilson, nobody knew then, was bound to come; 
but it was obvious to every one, to Mr. Wilson it was 
clearer than to any one else, that the great principle 
at stake and the material interests of the United 
States would be in jeopardy were the Democratic 
party to be defeated at the forthcoming election. 
And it must be remembered Mr. Wilson had not 
abandoned hope that war could be averted. It was a 
slender hope, for after the sinking of the Sussex in 
April, 1916, the breaking point had been almost 
reached, but Germany had once more given pledges, 
and without being unduly optimistic, Mr. Wilson 
might believe Germany would see the folly of dragging 
the United States to war. 

In 1912 the campaign was fought on domestic 
issues, and the American people went to the polls to 
vote for the candidate who promised the social reforms 
they demanded, no thought of foreign affairs being 
in their minds. In 1916 the foreign policy of the 
Administration, Mexico and the war, was, in effect, 
the only issue before the American people. The war 
had brought such confusion to America that the well- 
established bases of political calculations were worth- 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 215 

less. The Germans longed for the defeat of Mr. 
Wilson, yet they felt by no means certain that the 
election of IMr. Hughes would not throw America 
into the war, and, much as tlicy hated Mr. Wilson, 
they were shrewd enough to see that they would 
gain nothing by his defeat if with the incoming of the 
Republicans the United States ceased to be neutral. 
The general knowledge of the attitude of the Germans 
and the hope of the German Government that the 
Democrats would lose the election, brought to jNIr. 
Wilson's support Americans whose patriotism was 
stronger than their partisanship ; who resented a for- 
eign element under the dictation of a foreign govern- 
ment attempting to punish the President for defending 
American rights. But the deciding factor unquestion- 
ably was the strong sentiment, irrespective of party, in 
favor of peace, which was crystallized into the cam- 
paign cry — perhaps the most effective any candidate 
ever had, and all the more effective because it was 
spontaneous and not manufactured — "He kept us 
out of war." 

Twice Mr. Wilson had been tempted, and twice he 
had resisted. Mexico and military glory were dangled 
before his eyes and he turned his back upon them. 
To win the fame that is the possession of every war 
President was his if he cared to take it, and he would 
not. The man that twice had given these hostages to 
his peaceful desires was safer at the head of affairs 
at a time so critical than an unknown man, the candi- 



216 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

date of a party whose leaders were shouting for war. 
Exalted unselfishness and the most despicable selfish- 
ness were again leagued in a common cause. Good 
men and women, to whom the very thought of war 
was dreadful, voted for Mr. Wilson because he had 
kept the country out of war, and to them nothing 
was more horrible than the slaughter of war. Western 
farmers voted for Mr. Wilson because he had kept the 
country out of war, and by keeping the country out 
of war Mr. Wilson had indirectly been the means of 
adding enormously to the price of every bushel of 
wheat, every horse, every bullock their farms pro- 
duced. 

Mr. Wilson was elected by a popular plurality of 
581,000 votes and a majority of twenty-three votes in 
the electoral college, but these figures while statistically 
correct are deceptive. The election, in fact, was 
extremely close, and the balance between the two 
parties almost microscopic. The total vote cast was 
18,529,406. Mr. Wilson's plurality was only a trifle 
more than three fer cent, but even this meager margin 
does not tell how narrowly Mr. Wilson missed defeat. 
The whole number of votes in the electoral college 
was 531, 266 votes were necessary to a choice, Mr. 
Wilson receiving 277 and Mr. Hughes 254. California 
has thirteen votes in the electoral college, and Mr. 
Wilson carried California by the slender margin of 
3773 votes in a total vote of 999,968; a fractional 
change in the vote would have given Mr. Hughes the 



AiMEllICA IN THE WAR 217 

Presidency by a majority of one electoral vote. Several 
other states were almost as close. ^Yithout the 
eighteen votes of Missouri in the electoral college 
Mr. Wilson was defeated, yet he had an excess of 
less than four jper cent of the aggregate vote. Without 
the ten votes of Kansas Mr. Wilson could not have 
been elected, but his majority was a fraction less than 
six fer cent of the whole. Even more remarkable 
was the Minnesota vote, where in a total of 387,378 
votes ^Ir. Hughes carried the State by only 30(5 \'otes. 
These figures justified the partisans of both candidates 
l)efore election in counting upon victory and prove 
both candidates were warranted in fearing defeat. 

2 

The five months that passed between his nomination 
in June and his election in November were perhaps 
the most trying time of Mr. Wilson's public life. Mr. 
Wilson was President, would remain President until 
the following ]\Iarcli, but it is a weakness of the 
American political sj^stem that if the President is 
the party's candidate for reelection he is shackled 
between nomination and election, and ceases almost 
to have any influence after election if he is defeated. 
Mr. Wilson was in somewhat the same position that 
Lincoln was in the summer of 1864, who believed he 
was to be defeated at the coming November election, 
who knew that the election of McClellan meant the 
ending of the war not by victory of the North and 



218 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the extirpation of slavery and the vindication of the 
principle of political unity, but by a compromise 
which would settle nothing and leave conditions ripe 
for another conflict. "Seldom in history was so much 
staked upon a popular vote. I suppose never in 
history," Emerson wrote after the election ; and now 
as we look back we can see how much was staked on 
that vote of the American people in November, 1916. 

Earlier in the year, on April 18, Mr. Wilson sent 
to the German Government a note on the sinking of 
the cross-Channel French steamer Sussex, which he de- 
clared was "one of the most terrible examples of 
the inhumanity of submarine warfare as the com- 
manders of German vessels are conducting it"; and 
he notified Germany that "unless the Imperial Govern- 
ment should now immediately declare and effect an 
abandonment of its present methods of submarine 
warfare against passenger and freight carrying vessels, 
the Government of the United States can have no 
choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the 
German Government altogether." On the following 
day the President went before Congress and repeated 
in substance, in some passages textually, his note to 
Germany. 

Germany gave assurances that she would change 
her methods of submarine warfare and would not 
attack unarmed merchant vessels without warning, 
and between May, 191C, and the end of January, 
1917, she made some pretense of observing her obli- 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 2li) 

gation; not with strict honesty, because the German 
cannot be honest, but with seeming desire to respect 
her pledge ; which convinced Americans Germany 
had yielded to Mr. ^Yilson and was anxious not to 
add the United States to her foes. But as the summer 
waned Mr, Wilson knew" to the contrary ; he knew that 
Germany had again lied to gain time, that submarines 
were being built to the full extent of German facilities, 
and the only reason Germany appeared to be submissive 
was that she was not then ready to defy the United 
States. ^Yhen that time came, when she felt herself 
strong enough to defy the United States as she had 
defied the rest of the world, the campaign of murder 
would be resumed, American vessels would be de- 
stroyed and American lives taken, and then, slightly 
to paraphrase Mr. Wilson's w^ords used in another 
connection, "not gently, with ceremonious intro- 
duction, but suddenly and at once", America would 
be brought squarely to face the issue. 

In his address formally accepting his nomination, on 
September 2, Mr. Wilson showed what was in his 
mind but, as he likes to do, by periphrase rather than 
direct statement. "In foreign affairs," he said, 
"we have been guided by principles clearly conceived 
and consistently lived up to. Perhaps they have not 
been fully comprehended because they have hitherto 
governed international affairs only in theory, not in 
practice. They are simple, obvious, easily stated, 
and fundamental to American ideals. 



220 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

"We have been neutral not only because it was the 
fixed and traditional policy of the United States to 
stand aloof from the politics of Europe and because we 
had had no part either of action or of policy in the 
influences which brought on the present war, but also 
because it was manifestly our duty to prevent, if it 
were possible, the indefinite extension of the fires of 
hate and desolation kindled by that terrible conflict 
and seek to serve mankind by reserving our strength 
and our resources for the anxious and difficult day of 
restoration and healing which must follow, when peace 
will have to build its house anew. 

"The rights of our own citizens of course became 
involved : that was inevitable. Where they did this 
was our guiding principle : that property rights can 
be vindicated by claims for damages when the war is 
over, and no modern nation can decline to arbitrate 
such claims ; but the fundamental rights of humanity 
cannot be. The loss of life is irreparable. Neither 
can a direct violation of a nation's sovereignty await 
vindication in suits for damages. The nation that 
violates these essential rights must expect to be 
checked and called to account by direct challenge and 
resistance. It at once makes the quarrel in part our 
own. These are plain principles and we have never 
lost sight of them or departed from them, whatever 
the stress or perplexity of circumstance or the provo- 
cation to hasty resentment. The record is clear and 
consistent throughout and stands distinct and definite 



AMERICA IX THE WAR 2"21 

for every one to judge who wishes to know tlie Irulh 
about it." 

This was warning to Germany that if she ehaUenged 
the challenge would ])e niel. To the country it was 
notice that if Germany resumed her campaign of 
murder on the high seas American neutrality would 
cease. Mr. Wilson took notice of German intrigues 
in America and flung down the gauntlet. "I am the 
candidate of a party," he said, "but I am above all 
things else an American citizen. I neither seek the 
favor nor fear the displeasure of that small alien 
element amongst us which puts loyalty to any foreign 
power before loyalty to the United States." 

Referring to Mexico, because he was defending his 
Mexican as w'ell as his European policy, Mr. Wilson 
said: "So long as the power of recognition rests with 
me the Government of the United States will refuse to 
extend the hand of welcome to any one who obtains 
power in a sister republic by treachery and violence. 
I declared that to be the policy of the Administration 
within three weeks after I assumed the Presidency. I 
here again vow it. I am more interested in the 
fortunes of oppressed men and pitiful women and 
children than in any property rights whatever. Mis- 
takes I have no doubt made in this perplexing business, 
but not in purpose or object." 

In concluding he said he looked forward to the day 
when "America shall strive to stir the world without 
irritating it or drawing it on to new antagonisms, when 



222 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the nations wath which we deal shall at last come to 
see upon what deep foundations of humanity and 
justice our passion for peace rests, and when all man- 
kind shall look upon our great people with a new 
sentiment of admiration, friendly rivalry and real 
affection, as upon a people who, though keen to suc- 
ceed, seeks always to be at once generous and just 
and to whom humanity is dearer than profit or selfish 
power." 

Throughout the summer Mr. Wilson continued to 
make speeches, on every occasion stressing the desire 
of the country for peace but equally stressing moral 
duty. Before the New York Press Club, on June 30, 
he said he was constantly in receipt of letters from 
unknown men and humble women and the one prayer 
in all these letters was : "Mr. President, do not allow 
anybody to persuade you that the people of this 
country want war with anybody," and he added : 
"I am for the time being the spokesman of such people, 
gentlemen. I have not read history without observing 
that the greatest forces in the world and the only 
permanent forces are the moral forces. . . . 

"I am willing, no matter what my personal fortunes 
may be, to play for the verdict of mankind. Person- 
ally, it will be a matter of indifference to me what the 
verdict on the seventh of November is, provided I 
feel any degree of confidence that when a later jury 
sits I shall get their judgment in my favor. Not in 
my favor personally — what difference does that 



AMERICA IN THE WAIl OOA 

make? — but in my favor as an honest and con- 
scientious spokesman of a great nation." 

Addressing a Citizenship Convention in Washing- 
ton, July 13, the President said: "America was in- 
tended to be a spirit among the nations of the world, 
and it is the purpose of conferences like this to find out 
the best way to introduce the newcomers to this s])irit, 
and by that very interest in them to enhance and purify 
in ourselves the thing that ought to make America 
great and not only ought to make her great, but ought 
to make her exhibit a spirit unlike any other nation in 
the w^orld. . . . No man has ever risen to the real 
stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that 
it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve 
himself. . . . This process of Americanization is 
going to be a process of purification, a process of reded i- 
cation to the things which America represents and is 
proud to represent. And it takes a great deal more 
courage and steadfastness, my fellow citizens, to 
represent ideal things than to represent anything else." 

On the fourth of September IVIr. Wilson accepted 
on behalf of the nation the Lincoln Memorial, built 
on the site of the log cabin in which Lincoln was born. 
Although Mr. W'ilson commands the world as his 
audience he is not a great stylist, he has none of that 
marvelous use of the simplest words that gave dis- 
tinction to everything that Lincoln wrote and made 
his Gettysburg Address immortal and his Second 
Inaugural a classic ; his short letters, of which he has 



224 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

written many, are banal, commonplace even, con- 
trasted with the sentiment and diction of Lincoln's 
living letter to Mrs. Bixby, for instance ; but Mr. 
Wilson's strength is his sincerity, his profound belief 
in the things he says, the expression of his idealism, 
which, like his religion, is not a garment but the very 
fiber of his being. He is the voice of mankind crying 
in the wilderness. He speaks for the silent mass, 
silent but thinking, who cannot speak for itself. He 
says what men believe. He has made idealism real. 
In all that Mr. Wilson has written the Lincoln Ad- 
dress, as literature, will undoubtedly rank first. It 
has a quality found in nothing else from his pen ; it 
has style, sentiment, imagination ; it is as if the 
spirit of Lincoln had touched his disciple and guided 
him. "This is a place alike of mystery and reassur- 
ance", is a sentence from the Address. The mystery 
remains. 

The Address should be read, not alone for the pleas- 
ure it will give to every lover of noble thoughts made 
beautiful by beautifully phrased English, but because 
we may accept one portion of it as an intimate self- 
revelation. I have said in a previous chapter that Mr. 
Wilson has been a close student of Lincoln's methods, 
and it is interesting to hear from Mr. Wilson himself : 
"I have read many biographies of Lincoln; I have 
sought out with the greatest interest the many inti- 
mate stories that are told of him, the narratives of 
near-by friends, the sketches at close quarters, in 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 225 

which those who had the privilege of being associated 
with him have tried to depict for us the very man 
himself 'in his habit as he lived' ; but I have nowhere 
found a real intimate of Lincoln's." The impression 
he received, Mr. Wilson said, was that no one "had 
in fact penetrated to the heart of his mystery, or 
that any man could penetrate to the heart of it. That 
brooding spirit had no real familiars. I get the im- 
pression that it never spoke out in complete self- 
revelation, and that it could not reveal itself completely 
to any one." Mr. Wilson is no brooding spirit, but 
do not those few lines deeply etched give us the por- 
trait of the artist? Lincoln revealed himself through 
what he said and wrote and did; so has Mr. Wilson, 
and yet one feels about Mr. Wilson as he felt about 
Lincoln : he comprehended men without fully com- 
muning with them ; that in spite of all his genial efforts 
at comradeship his spirit dwelt apart, saw its visions 
of duty where no man looked on. "There is a very 
holy and very terrible isolation," the President said, 
"for the conscience of every man who seeks to read 
the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, 
for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy 
no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the 
spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist. This 
strange child of the cabin kept company with invisible 
things, was born into no intimacy but that of its own 
silently assembling and deploying thoughts." 



226 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

3 

Reelected, ]\Ir. Wilson now felt himself free to act. 
The country was not yet ready for war, but it was fast 
reaching that point when it needed only to be told war 
was unavoidable to accept the decision. "The whole 
art and practice of government consists, not in moving 
individuals, but in moving masses," Mr. Wilson said 
in one of his speeches during the summer. The mass 
was now moving. Mr. Gerard, the American 
ambassador to Berlin, who had kept his head under 
the most trying circumstances and with marked 
intelligence forecast the future, had fully informed 
Mr. Wilson what to expect. The moving mass was 
soon to act. 

On December 12 Germany proposed a discussion of 
peace, which the Allies rejected. On December 18 
the President sent a note to all the belligerents suggest- 
ing that they state their views "as to the terms upon 
which the war might be concluded and the arrange- 
ments which would be deemed satisfactory as a 
guaranty against its renewal or the kindling of any 
similar conflict in the future as would make it possible 
frankly to compare them." The suggestion was 
received with respect, but it led to no practical results. 

Mr. Wilson was now to make the last effort to bring 
about peace and keep his own country at peace, be- 
cause he knew Germany was bending every effort to 
renew her unrestricted submarine warfare and the 
time could be measured when Germany would feel 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 227 

her weapon was strong enoiigli to make her in(Hfferent 
to the remonstrance of the United States. On Jannary 
22, 1917, Mr. Wilson addressed the Senate on what 
shouki be the essential terms of peace. His chief 
proposition was the necessity of the formation of a 
league of nations to guarantee peace and justice 
throughout the world, to which the United States must 
adhere. It was in this address Mr. Wilson used the 
phrase "it must be a peace without victory." "Vic- 
tory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's 
terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be 
accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable 
sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a 
bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, 
not permanently, but only as upon quicksand." 

To the Allies this was not pleasant reading. For 
more than two years and a half they had been fighting 
against overwhelming odds, they had fought not an 
honorable foe who redeemed the ghastly business of 
war by his chivalry, but an enemy whose savagery 
disgraced the savage, whose unspeakable crimes made 
civilization tremble, who had committed infamies 
that only a nation perverted and degenerate could 
conceive or execute. Yet the high courage of the 
Allies had not wavered. They were sustained by the 
strength of the spirit. In the beginning, with bare 
hands, they had beaten back the advancing hordes, 
savages, but armed with all the devices of science 
corrupted to torture and kill. Through long and 



228 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

weary months they had fought and died, but their 
resolve could not be killed. They were prepared to 
die, to give their lives if need be to the cause which 
made the humblest in their ranks a hero, but they 
would not surrender or cravenly accept a compromise 
peace that would leave Germany the victor and en- 
courage her again to plunge the world in despair. 

But this. Allied opinion believed, Mr. Wilson pro- 
posed. A peace without victory, a peace that should 
enable Germany to escape her just punishment, that 
should leave her unscathed while she had left Belgium 
in ruins, and to France, fighting only in self-defense, 
brought desolation, could not be entertained. It 
would be contrary not only to every tradition of the 
Anglo-Saxon race and blood but it would have been 
an admission of defeat, a confession of cowardice, the 
recognition that the world acknowledged only force, 
that morality no longer existed and only might pre- 
vailed. 

Mr. Wilson's appeal was moving, he urged it with 
all his force and eloquence and sincerity, but it did not 
touch the hearts of the Allied peoples, suffering, weary, 
weighted under their heavy load of sorrow, but grim 
and determined, their iron wills unbroken. " Perhaps," 
Mr. Wilson said to the Senate, "I am the only person 
in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world 
who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back. I 
am speaking as an individual, and yet I am speaking 
also, of" course, as the responsible head of a great 



AMERICA IN THE WAR 229 

government, and I feel confident that I have said what 
the people of the United States would wish me to say. 
May I not add that I hope and believe that I am in 
effect speaking for liberals and friends of hunianily 
in every nation and of every program of liberty ? I 
would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent 
mass of mankind everywhere who have as yet had no 
place or opportunity to speak their real hearts out 
concerning the death and ruin they see to have come 
already upon the persons and the homes they hold 
most dear." 

More than one consideration makes this perhaps 
the most important of all of Mr. Wilson's pre-war 
addresses. In broad terms he proposed to all the 
belligerents "peace without victory", which would 
apply equally to the Entente as to Germany and her 
allies, but, in fact, it was the last opportunity to Ger- 
many to escape being crushed. If the United States 
came into the war, — and no statesman whose sources 
of information were as complete as Mr. Wilson's 
could doubt how events were being shaped, — never 
again would Germany be offered peace without vic- 
tory. Once the United States drew the sword she 
w^ould not sheathe it until her sword had been the 
means of winning peace with victory. Mr. Wilson's 
profound knowledge of the psychology of his own 
people was not needed to establish this. The American 
people would not go to war, but they could be forced 
into war; engaged in war they would go through witli 



230 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

it ; they would fight for victory and exact the victor's 
terms. Half measures would satisfy no one; the 
magnitude of the war, the sacrifices that the war 
would demand, the dramatic seizure of the imagination 
— for the first time in history an American army fight- 
ing on the soil of Europe against a European nation ; 
the moral no less than the material support that 
America was to give to England and France ; the 
reaction on the American by the companionship of 
arms with Englishmen and Frenclimen ; the sym- 
pathy which would fill the American when he knew 
what Englishmen and Frenchmen had suffered in 
those years when he lived in security and comfort and 
coined their misery into profit ; regret and a chivalrous 
desire to atone by works ; the feeling of hate he would 
have for Germany when he saw what Germany had 
done and the anguish she had caused, — Mr. Wilson 
would have been devoid of imagination and his vision 
blinded had he not known that with the landing of the 
first American soldier in France the hearts of the 
American people would be steeled to peace with vic- 
tory, and their resolution would be unshakable to make 
Germany know the meaning of the victor's terms. 

The Address of January 22 has caused more dis- 
cussion than anything Mr. Wilson has said or done. 
On its face it is so inconsistent with all that Mr. 
Wilson said before that day or was to say or do so 
soon after that day that it is irreconcilable with pre- 
cept or performance. Yet not by a shade does it 



AMEUK'A I\ TIIK WAR <2:;i 

vary from the consistent policy Mr. AYilson pursued 
from the outset, nor does it depart by a liair's breadth 
from the morahty he had so constantly preached and 
was so anxious to have accepted ; he was as logical 
then as he had been from the first day of the war. 

Mr. Wilson has been accused of inconsistency, of 
being wool when he ought to be iron ; the policj' of 
opportunism, in short, which was precisely the same 
accusation brought against Lincoln. In 18G2 Lin- 
coln caused a tremendous storm by writing to Horace 
Greeley: "If I could save the Union without freeing 
any slave I would do it ; and if I could save it by free- 
ing all the slaves I would do it ; and if I could save it 
by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also 
do that." Lincoln's opponents could feel they were 
in honesty warranted in saying that he was wavering ; 
that he was willing to free the slaves or compromise 
with slavery ; that he was uncertain when he ought 
to have been resolute. But in that same letter he 
also said: "^Miat I do about slavery and the colored 
race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union ; 
and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe 
it would help to save the Union. I shall do less when- 
ever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, 
and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more 
will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when 
shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so 
fast as they shall appear to be true views." 

Mr. Wilson could very well have spoken in [he 



232 WOODROW \nLSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

language of Lincoln ; like Lincoln he could have said 
he would correct errors when shown to be errors ; he 
would adopt new views when they were shown to be 
correct views ; like Lincoln he could have said he 
would do less or more according as he believed it 
would hurt or help the moral cause so dear and near 
to his heart. 

The foundation of Mr. Wilson's policy is morality. 
That has been said before, it has been emphasized, 
and it cannot be overemphasized if the man is to be 
understood, for the policy is the man. His critics call 
it idealism. His opponents say it is the unprac- 
tical, dogmatic man forced by accident into a place 
for which he is unfitted. One may call it idealism, 
one may describe Mr. Wilson as the unpractical man, 
but the fact remains that his policy from the first 
day he entered the White House has been dictated by 
morality. It was morality that governed his Mexican 
policy ; it was morality that would not permit him 
to countenance American bankers taking their pound 
of flesh from China, it was morality that made him 
ask for the repeal of the Panama Canal tolls exemp- 
tion, it was morality that made him see the unfairness 
of the anti-Japanese legislation, it was morality that 
imposed upon him neutrality and self-restraint and 
paticmce. It was morality, again, that dictated the 
Address of January 22. 

The war had gone on for thirty months. It had 
accomplished nothing, except to drown the world in 



AMERICA IN THE ^^All 233 

blood ; it had brought nothing, only devastation, 
destruction, desolation. Germany had not won, but 
could the Alhes win ? Mr. Wilson is not a military 
man, — it is one of the elements of his strenglli that 
he knows his own hmitations and does not pretend to 
knowledge he does not possess, — but taking counsel 
from the men whose opinion was valuable, it is not 
surprising that at times he should have beheved the 
Allied task was hopeless. There were men about 
Mr. Wilson, able men and unprejudiced, who knew 
the elements and could give them their proper value, 
who doubted w^hether Germany could be decisively 
defeated, who felt sure she could not be starved or 
broken financially. The war might continue another 
thirty months, another thirty months of horror and 
death, to end in a peace by the compromise of ex- 
haustion or a victor's peace that would leave Europe a 
charnel house and her peoples mad in their despair. 

Was it worth it ? Was there not something better 
worth while,'' Did it not offer promise of richer 
reward for the future security and happiness of the 
world? The old morality like the old diplomacy, 
wars for greed, to satisfy dynastic ambition, to crush 
weaker nations ; secret treaties, the intrigues of dis- 
honest or ambitious statesmen, the jealousies and 
rivalries of parties trading on the fear of foreign attack ; 
these things were to Mr. Wilson abhorrent, immoral, 
unrighteous. These things a European statesman 
brought up in the traditions of European statecraft 



234 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

would perhaps have said had always been, must 
always be; they were inevitable. To Mr. Wilson, 
viewing not only history but life from the detachment 
of America, his traditions being not the statecraft of 
Europe but the democracy of America, believing in 
democracy and the consent of the governed, that these 
things had been was no reason that they should con- 
tinue ; they were not inevitable. In an age priding 
itself on its morality the relations between nations 
should be governed by the same code of morality as 
between individuals. 

We see now why Mr. Wilson addressed the Senate 
on the twenty -second of January. The rule of law 
and morality could not be put into operation unless it 
had the sanction of the United States, more than that, 
unless the United States was prepared physically to 
make it operative. It was the bold thing that Mr, 
Wilson proposed, the idealistic thing, but also the 
moral thing. He was proposing nothing less than the 
abandonment by the United States of her traditional 
policy, that she should emerge from her isolation and 
become a partner in a European league, not, as he said, 
to create a new balance of power, for with the balance 
of power he had no concern, but a community of 
power ; not to help to create new organized rivalries, 
but an organized common peace. 

The address has further importance because it was 
Mr. Wilson's last effort to save the world from the 
terrors that were on it, and because it proves that up to 



AMERICA IN THE WAR '^'35 

the last moment, up to the time when Germany made 
war upon the United States, Mr. Wilson was still 
ardently desirous of peace and trying to find a means 
of accommodation between Germany and lu r enemies. 
It will be of interest to the historian and the future 
biographer of Mr. Wilson. His fame, it has before 
been remarked, would be different to what it now is 
had he died in 1915 or been defeated in 1916; he 
would occupy a different place in history if the Ad- 
dress to the Senate of January 22, 1917, had been his 
last official utterance on the war ; for the historian, 
ignorant of Mr. Wilson's motives, would believe that 
he was so anxious for peace he was willing to subscribe 
to a peace that rewarded the oppressor, the violator 
of treaties and the mocker of law and morality. In 
his address to the Railroad Business Association, on 
January 27, 1916, using colloquial speech, Mr. W'ilson 
said, "The minute I stop changing my mind with the 
change of all the circumstances of the world, I will 
be a back number." It is Mr. Wilson's strength that 
he has not been ashamed to change his mind as condi- 
tions made change necessary, and it is because he is 
able to change with changing circumstance that he has 
not become a back number but has remained in the 
front rank of the statesmen of the world, frequently in 
advance of them and to lead them ; to inspire the 
thought of all nations; not to beckon peoples but 
boldly to go forward, confident they will follow. On 
January 22 he was the spokesman of j^eace, a few 



236 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

months later he was to be the spokesman of war, as 
little desirous of war then as he had always been, but 
forced by the stimulus of circumstance to be for war 
as in the past he had labored to mold circumstance 
to avert war. 

4 

On January 31 Germany announced the long- 
expected renewal of the submarine war by virtually 
closing the seas to all neutral vessels. On receipt of 
what was in effect an ultimatum to the United States 
Mr. Wilson immediately severed diplomatic relations 
with Germany. On the third of February he addressed 
Congress, informing that body of the action he had 
taken and adding that he did not believe Germany 
would enforce her threat to sink American ships in 
the war zone, but if his hope proved unfounded he 
would ask Congress for the necessary authority to take 
measures of protection. 

On February 26 Mr. Wilson again addressed Con- 
gress. He asked for authority to declare a state of 
armed neutrality existing against Germany, to arm 
merchant ships, and to employ any other instrumen- 
talities or methods necessary to protect American lives 
and ships ; and the grant of a sufficient credit to pro- 
vide adequate means of protection. "I hope," the 
President said, "that I need give no further proofs 
and assurances than I have already given throughout 
nearly three years of anxious patience that I am the 



AMERICA IN THE WAil 2S7 

friend of peace and mean to preserve il for America 
so long as I am able. I am not now proposing or con- 
templating war or any steps that need lead to il. . . . 
I believe that the people will be willing to trust me to 
act with restraint, with prudence, and the true spirit 
of amity and good faith that they have themselves 
displayed throughout these trying months." 

Mr. Wilson said that doubtless under his constitu- 
tional duties and powers he had the authority for 
which he asked, "but I prefer, in the present cir- 
cumstances, not to act upon general implication. I 
wish to feel that the authority and the power of the 
Congress are behind me in whatever it may become 
necessary for me to do." His purpose was plain. 
Congress must by positive action show whether it 
would defend the interests of the United States or 
shield Germany. 

The term of the Congress would expire by con- 
stitutional limitation on the following fourth of March, 
so that little time was left for discussion if the authority 
the President asked for was to be granted by the exist- 
ing Congress. A bill conferring the necessary power 
was quickly passed by the House by a vote of 403 to 
14, but in the Senate action was defeated by the 
opposition of eleven men, who, under the rules of the 
Senate permitting unlimited debate, were able to 
prevent a vote being reached before final adjourn- 
ment. Although the protectors of Germany had. 
for the moment, defeated the President, Mr. Wilson 



238 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

had also been given unmistakable proof of the temper 
of the country as represented by Congress. In the 
House the majority was overwhelming, in the Senate 
the majority would have been equally impressive 
had a vote been taken. Mr. Wilson now had nothing 
more to fear. The time of doubt and suspense was 
over. Discussion had ceased. The time for action 
had come. 

On the fifth of March Mr. Wilson delivered his 
second inaugural. War was in the thought of every 
man, it was seen to be inevitable, and Mr. Wilson 
expressed what every man was thinking. Warning 
his audience that the United States might be drawn 
into the war, he said : "We desire neither conquest nor 
advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at 
the cost of another people. We have always professed 
unselfish purpose and we covet the opportunity to 
prove that our professions are sincere." He urged 
unity — "an America united in feeling, in purpose, 
and in its vision of duty, of opportunity, and of service. 
. . . United alike in the conception of our duty and 
in the high resolve to perform it in the face of all men, 
let us dedicate ourselves to the great task to which 
we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your 
tolerance, your countenance, and your united aid." 

Mr. Wilson had issued his proclamation convening 
Congress in extra session, and on the evening of its 
first day, on April second, he asked for a declaration 
of war against Germany, saying: "There is one choice 



AMERICA IN THE WAll 23!) 

we cannot make, we are incapable of niakln<^ ; we 
will not choose the path of submission and sulFer the 
most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be 
ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we 
now array ourselves are no common wrongs : they 
cut to the very roots of human life." In asking tliis, 
however, Mr. Wilson emphasized the necessity of 
making very clear to all the world the motives and 
objects of America. They were to vindicate tlie prin- 
ciples of peace and justice as against selfish and auto- 
cratic power and to set up amongst the really free and 
self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of 
purpose and of action as would henceforth insure the 
observance of those principles. "It is a fearful 
thing," he said in conclusion, "to lead this great, 
peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and 
disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be 
in the balance. But the right is more precious than 
peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have 
always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for 
the right of those who submit to authority to have a 
voice in their own governments, for the rights and 
liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of 
right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring 
peace and safety to all nations and make the world 
itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our 
lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and 
everything that we have, with the pride of those who 
know that the day has come when America is privileged 



240 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

to spend her blood and her might for the principles that 
gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she 
has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other." 
The last word had been spoken. America was at 
war. Mr. Wilson had ceased to be the protagonist of 
peace and had become the War President. 



CHAPTER XI 

The War President 
1 

Mr. Wilson had not preached in vain. The day 
of conversion had come. His position before the 
country was stronger because of the long and patient 
efforts he had made to save peace. The people who 
voted for him because he kept the country out of war, 
who were wiOing to do anything to avert war, now that 
Mr. Wilson asked for war could not refuse. The im- 
pulse was too strong. They were convinced that no 
other course was possible, and it was their duty to be 
as loyal and zealous in their support of the War 
President as before they had sustained him endeavor- 
ing to keep peace. 

They had argued about morality, they had scoffed 
at morality, the war was none of their business, but 
really it had always been their business and deep in 
their hearts they felt it, but it was not until Mr. 
Wilson made plain what their hearts felt that they 
knew. 

This transformation did not come overnight. The 
mental attitude of a people is not to be changed 

241 



242 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

between sundown and daybreak ; even cataclysmic 
causes do not produce such a sudden reversal. For 
three years the American people had talked peace 
and been encouraged to believe come what might they 
must remain at peace ; the seduction of peace was not 
easily to be resisted. At the beginning they were 
bewildered, somewhat dazed by what they had done ; 
not quite comprehending all that it meant, the scope 
of war not apparent ; the war was still far away from 
them and touching neither their lives nor their happi- 
ness. The country was committed to war, but dis- 
cussion had not entirely ceased. The fifty votes 
cast against the war resolution in the House of Rep- 
resentatives, whose members are supposed to be very 
close to the people and correctly to interpret their 
feelings, might be accepted as proof that a strong 
sentiment existed against war and the unity for which 
the President had appealed was to be denied him ; 
that the thing most to be feared was to be realized, 
and he was to lead a divided nation to war. Yet the 
negative vote in the House was an appearance greater 
than the reality. It was the last effort of Germany 
intrenched in America, soon to be driven out and 
utterly routed. At heart America was sound. No 
people ever went to war with more unselfish motives 
or with less to gain ; it was in the spirit of the crusader 
America went to war : to succor humanity and relieve 
the oppressed. Even Americans themselves did not 
at first realize the spirit that moved them, it was a 



THE ^YAll PRESIDENT 24.'J 

spirit so fine, so woiulerrul, so far removed from the 
sordid things of the market phice and the practical 
things of Hfe, it was the spirit- of the mystic ratlier 
than the materiahst, that Americans failed to under- 
stand this new meaning of life. But the meaning was 
soon to come to them, and with understanding was 
the resolve to carry the arms of America for the 
freedom of the world. For this concept of duty, this 
dedication to service and sacrifice, the moral teachings 
and preachments of Mr. Wilson, before the war and 
after America entered the war, were the moving cause. 

He had taught, and was to continue to teach, not 
alone his own people but the whole world the meaning 
of democracy. Even to Americans and to the more 
advanced nations of Europe, England and France 
especially, democracy was a somewhat intangible 
thing. To IVIr. Wilson it was very real. It was 
accepted as a matter of course by Americans, who, 
having known nothing else, politically and socially, 
took it as much a matter of course as the air they 
breathed ; it was theirs by right inherent. 

Mr. Wilson gave them a shibboleth, and in giving it 
to them he gave them something more than a phrase ; 
and a coiner of a phrase has the ear of the world. He 
gave them something to cling to. "To make the world 
safe for democracy" was splendid, but powerless to 
move mountains unless there was faith. Again it 
was one of those idealistic conceptions without meaning 
to the practical, that was scoflFed at and made sport 



244 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

of because it was a magnificent generality that led 
nowhere. While Germany was ravaging Europe and 
all the world was taught that only force could save 
civilization, Mr. Wilson would redeem the world with 
a principle of political philosophy. In a world dis- 
traught by war and fearful of its horrors, Mr. Wilson's 
remote philosophical detachment was to the average 
man exasperating; it was a mistaken attempt to sub- 
stitute academic and dispassionate discussion for 
strength; moreover, it seemed as foolish and con- 
temptible as if a man seeing his neighbor's house on 
fire were to retire to his study and by the light of the 
burning building, undisturbed by the cries for help, 
calmly write a treatise on how to make houses safe 
from fire. 

Mr. Wilson made democracy have a vital meaning 
to the peoples of the world. The purpose the civilized 
nations were striving for, he continually emphasized, 
was to make the world safe for democracy ; democracy 
thus ceased to be a theoretic principle, even a polity, 
and became a principle of life and a moral code. To 
the far corners of the earth he brought democracy, 
and he made men question and ask what was this 
thing big enough and spiritual enough that a nation, 
unthreatened by invasion and safe from attack, 
voluntarily should draw the sword to sustain it. 
Imagination was powerfully seized. Peoples with 
ideas and thoughts deep rooted in the soil of autocracy 
and a paternal feudalism, to whom democracy as a 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 245 

philosophy or a poHty had no meaning, who were 
intellectually incapable of grasping the concept of a 
state of society in which social and political equality 
existed, to whom democracy was as meaningless as an 
untranslatable word in a foreign tongue, were, never- 
theless, stirred and moved by the great spiritual force 
Mr. Wilson unloosed. The America that was had 
ceased to be, and in her place was a new America ; 
an America that had cast off the old ideas and stood 
before the world the champion of a new morality, 
inviting all the world to join with her to secure the 
morality of the world. 

Mr. Wilson gave to men a new hope and to man- 
kind a fresh impulse. In the twentieth century he 
made America the same example and inspiration she 
had been in the eighteenth when men with faith, but 
still fearful, waited the result of their audacious experi- 
ment. To his countrymen he gave not only a shib- 
boleth but, what was of far greater importance, a cause. 
They scoffed at first, but mockery gave way to ques- 
tioning, and with questioning came comprehension. 
To make the world safe for democracy was no longer 
idealism but an aspiration as sublime as it was prac- 
tical ; it would rid the world of the terrors that beset 
it, and it was to justify the nation in taking up arms. 
Democracy heard the call and responded, and oppressed 
peoples everywhere prayed for the success of its 
arms so that they might be liberated by democracy. 

Often Mr. Wilson has been accused of excessive 



246 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

deliberation, but he has repeatedly given proof of the 
power of immediate decision when action is imperative. 
Again he was to show his understanding of the Amer- 
ican temperament and to confirm that he possessed 
his leadership by right of intellect and force of char- 
acter. The question that called for instant decision 
was whether the armies to be raised by the United 
States were to be composed of volunteers or conscrip- 
tion was to be enforced. Conscription, compulsory 
military service, is foreign to American ideas ; obli- 
gatory military duty is as obnoxious to the American 
as to the Englishman, it is an infringement on personal 
liberty and that freedom of action so dear to democratic 
peoples whose boaSt is their right to dispose of them- 
selves as they please. The men who had voted against 
war, who were serving Germany while sitting in the 
American Congress, saw in the question a further 
opportunity to prevent the United States from exert- 
ing its full strength. Volunteers in large numbers 
could of course be obtained, of that there was no 
doubt; patriotism, the adventurous spirit of youth, 
detestation of Germany, would send men to the colors ; 
but the war would be carried on by classes and not by 
the whole nation, and it was essential that the nation 
should be enlisted and spiritually mobilized so that 
the war, a thing then remote, physically three thou- 
sand miles from the hearthstone of America, should be 
brought home to every fireside, and men and women, 
rich and poor, learned and unlettered, should touch 



THE WAR TRESIDENT 247 

elbows and in the companionshii) of their hearts be 
one. 

In his Address to Congress asking for a declaration 
of war Mr. Wilson recommended that the men needed 
for the increase of the armed forces of the United 
States should be "chosen upon the principle of uni- 
versal liability to service", and as soon as opposition to 
conscription developed in Congress all his authority 
was exerted to secure the passage of the necessary 
legislation. He was staking much upon his judgment. 
Defeat of the measure would have been notice to 
Germany that the forces she controlled in America 
were more powerful than the President, and that 
America, while dragged into war against its will by 
the President, at heart was opposed to the war and 
would be only lukewarm in its prosecution. The men 
of cool habit, and there are always such in high places 
in a time of crisis, were fearful that the country would 
resist the enforced taking of its young men for the 
army, and they recalled with the joy of disaster that 
the timid always enjoy, the draft riots of the Civil 
War. These dire forebodings only fortified the con- 
fidence Mr. Wilson had in the correctness of his judg- 
ment and the necessity and justice of the measure he 
advocated. Not without opposition Congress sanc- 
tioned conscription, and the country, instead of resist- 
ing it, agreed with the President that it was the only 
equitable and democratic way to create the armies of 
democracy. 



248 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

The events of the three years when the United 
States was a neutral have a certain perspective, 
exasperatingly flat, it is true, to the historical student 
who longs to know facts which will be the privilege 
of coming generations, but a perspective with depth 
and strength compared with the events of the past 
year, too near, too close at hand, to be judged with 
veracity. Yet there is background enough to throw 
into relief Mr. Wilson's work, in part, as the War 
Executive. He has played a dual role. He has been 
the American Prime Minister and the Chief of the 
American War Cabinet, and he has also been the moral 
leader of the Allied world. 

\\Tien America declared war Mr. Wilson resolved 
on three things as the principles to govern him. His- 
torically America declared war on Germany, actually 
it was Germany that forced America to go to war; 
but now that America was at war Mr. Wilson was 
determined that all the strength, all the resources, 
all the power and energy and intelligence that America 
controlled should be thrown into the conflict to bring 
about the defeat of Germany. Mr. Wilson had 
begun as a pacifist, and he had no regrets ; now he was 
the leader of a peaceful nation driven into war, and to 
revert to peace war must be made relentlessly, without 
hesitation or thought of consequences, until the world 
need no longer fear the menace of German militarism. 

He was determined there should be no civilian inter- 



THE WAR rUESIDENT 24!) 

ference with the inilitury authority. In every w;ir 
in which the United States has engaged, from the war 
of the Revolution to the war with Spain, the sudtkn 
increase of the army has compelled the hasty appoint- 
ment of officers, many of whom secured their com- 
missions because of their political influence rather 
than their military qualifications. The scandal of the 
"political general" should not be repeated in this 
war. The nucleus of the military organization would 
be the regular army, exactly as the cadres of the new 
regiments would be the veterans of barracks and field. 
Mr. Wilson did not know whether he had at hand a 
military genius, whether he had any man sufficiently 
versed in the tactics of modern warfare and with the 
requisite ability to take command of an army that 
must eventually rank with those of Allies and enemies, 
but he knew that if men trained in the profession of 
arms, who had given their lives to the study of their 
profession, who were not w^ithout actual experience of 
war, limited although it had been, were not fit to com- 
mand, it was not likely he would discover a hidden 
genius among politicians or men with political influence. 
He must work with the material he had, perhaps at 
first to find it unsatisfactory, perhaps to be compelled 
to change and again to change, as other nations had ; 
but to maintain the morale of the army and sustain 
the confidence of the country the men selected would 
be given their opportunity and not be hampered or 
embarrassed by political control. 



2ja WOODROW WILSON: AN EnTERPRETATION 

Mr. Wilson steadfastly adhered to this policy. More 
than once he was offered the temptation to gain the 
fleeting approval of his critics and opponents by the 
appointment of popular "heroes" who understood the 
publicity agent's art of appealing to the public by a 
sensational trick. This was especially so in the early 
months of the war, when the people were told much 
of what was being done and going to be done, but of 
actual accomplishment they could see little ; and the 
irresponsible individual who had an impossible scheme 
was sure to secure his audience, impatient because 
Germany was not j^et suing for peace. No encourage- 
ment was given by Mr. Wilson to individuals seeking 
only their own advancement or to grandiose plans that 
concealed personal ambition. The Conscription Law 
had been passed, but that did not prevent ardent 
patriots temporarily retired from politics from offer- 
ing to supplement the lagging efforts of the Govern- 
ment. Mr. Wilson was content to proceed in an 
orderly, systematic way, relying on men and methods 
whose efficiency was established rather than to trust 
to untried experiments or untested men. The success 
of the American army in France, the ability with which 
it has been transported, fed and supplied, the courage 
and discipline of its men and the skill of its commanders, 
which have earned for officers and men the high 
commendation and admiration of their British and 
French brothers in arms, would seem amply to vindi- 
cate Mr. Wilson's policy. 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 251 

]\Ir. Wilson was equally dotermincd that there 
should be no scandal, dishonesty or graft in connection 
with the war if high purpose, a proper system and wise 
precautions could foil the thief and the i)r()fitcer. In 
every war in which America has engaged, from the war 
of the Revolution to the war with Spain, the scandal 
of the dishonest and corrupt contractor and the in- 
competence of quartermasters and commissaries has 
been the shame of America. So far as the public has 
knowledge this war has been singularly free from 
maladministration and malversation. Mistakes have 
doubtless been made, — it would be surprising if 
they had not been, — money has been spent foolishly, 
unfit men have been appointed, especially in the first 
days when things had to be done w^ithout proper 
organization and time was more important than any- 
thing else; but taking the large view, the way in 
which the machinery of a standing army of a few 
thousand men was expanded to meet the needs of 
armies of millions is a tribute to the American genius 
for organization and the wisdom of the directing head. 



In a time of peace the American political system is 
less responsive to popular will and less democratic 
than the British or the French; for the President 
may forfeit the confidence of the country thirty days 
after he assumes oflBce and, unless he has been guilty of 
an illegal act, he can count with certainty on enjoying 



252 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the remaining three years and eleven months of his 
term; but a British Prime Minister or a French 
Premier who no longer has the confidence of the coun- 
try knows that long before thirty days have passed he 
will be out of oflBce. In a time of war this fixed tenure 
of the President has its advantages. Prime Ministers 
and Premiers must respect their parliamentary 
majorities and beware of their minorities ; they must 
win victories in the field and fight electoral battles at 
home; they may defeat the enemy and yet have to 
compromise with their political opponents. 

Mr. Wilson was secure. Congress might withhold 
its support, but it could not curtail his power or reduce 
his authority ; his Cabinet was of his own making 
and could be reformed only with his consent. Eng- 
land and France had seen changes of government to 
secure the proper adjustment between a government 
created for peace and a government charged with 
war, Cabinets had been split and broken and re- 
organized, and the process had brought strange politi- 
cal bedfellows. America was responsive to the re- 
action of England and France. If coalition govern- 
ments were necessary in those countries to win the 
war, was it not equally obvious that the President 
must now disregard the narrowness of party and call 
into council his erstwhile opponents ? As is so often 
the case self-interest was wrapped up in the napkin 
of virtue. The Republicans, — and who shall blame 
them ? — wanted a share of the credit in winning the 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 25:3 

war, they wanted to share with the Democrats I lie 
honor and glory of executive responsibility ; they 
wanted, looking to the future when politics would no 
longer be extinguished but would again flame, to be 
able to ask from the country that recognition to which 
they would be entitled for having brought victory to 
American arms. The only way they could secure what 
they coveted was by inducing Mr. Wilson to reform 
his Cabinet and give them certain portfolios. 

Mr. Wilson would not consent, nor is it surprising. 
We have seen what his theory of government is, he 
has himself told us that he does not believe in divided 
responsibility, he has criticized government by Con- 
gressional Committee, and he has given it as his firm 
conviction that in the same person there must reside 
the power to plan as well as the power to execute. If 
these were his beliefs in time of peace, when a division 
of authority might do harm but could not cause irrep- 
arable injury, it was certain that his conviction would 
be strengthened tenfold in time of war when divided 
councils or delay in the execution of the plan would 
be fatal. More than ever was it necessary that the 
President should be the Prime Minister, that he should 
originate policy and be able to carry it out. It was a 
policy to antagonize his opponents, to subject him to 
the criticism of overweening vanity and an over- 
powering belief in his superior wisdom, but with a 
strength of purpose that was irresistible, with an in- 
flexible will that was stubbornness in its unyielding 



254 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

resistance to attack, argument or the promptings of 
expediency Mr. Wilson remained obdurate. 

He had perfect trust in the loyalty and devotion 
of his Cabinet, he did not wish to risk the danger 
that might conceivably result from taking into his 
Cabinet men not of his own selection but who were 
forced upon him by his opponents, even if temporarily 
they had ceased to be political foes. Circumstances 
compelled Lincoln to do that, and we know what he 
suffered. "Did Stanton tell you I was a damned fool.^* 
Then I expect I must be one, for he is almost always 
right and generally says what he means," said Lin- 
coln of his Secretary of War in that careless manner 
that was so often to confuse his contemporaries. But 
we have Lincoln the master of his Cabinet, as he 
always was when mastery was required, reading to 
them this memorandum on the fourteenth of July, 
1864: 

"I must myself be the judge how long to retain in 
and when to remove any of you from his position. It 
would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavor- 
ing to procure another's removal, or in any way to 
prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would 
be a wrong to me, and, much worse, a wrong to the 
country. My wish is that on this subject no remark 
be made nor question asked by any of you, here or 
elsewhere, now or hereafter." 

There is nothing in Mr. Wilson's career, there Is 
nothing in what he has said or done, that will make us 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 255 

believe he held the same view of himself that Lord 
Chatham did: "I am sure that I can save this coun- 
try, and that nobody else can"; there is perhaps in 
him the same self-confidence that was abundantly 
justified which made the younger Pitt Prime Minister 
of England at twenty-four : "I place mucli dependence 
on my new colleagues ; I place still more dependence 
upon myself." 



From the inception of his Administration Mr. 
Wilson had given the members of his Cabinet a free 
rein in the management of the affairs of their depart- 
ments. Policy was his, to be retained in his own 
hands ; administration was theirs ; and perhaps no 
President had less interfered with his subordinates, 
or hampered them by the appointment of their sub- 
ordinates, than he. He held his Secretaries responsible 
for the work intrusted to them ; they must select the 
tools for the work to be done, and he would not ask 
them to work with unsuitable tools. His tempera- 
ment made him dislike office brokerage ; the time of 
the President was too valuable to be given to passing 
upon the claims of men to petty oflBce when there were 
larger and more important things to tax his attention. 
It was a policy not to endear him to Senators and 
Congressmen having constituents to placate or to 
reward, or to the party workers who felt their im- 
portance required that they should be afforded an 



^5Q WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

opportunity to present their special claims to the 
President in person rather than to submit them to a 
member of the Cabinet; but it was the policy of a 
man big enough to deal only with big things and to be 
indifferent to the inconsequential. 

With the outbreak of war Mr. Wilson saw the 
necessity even more rigidly to leave the Cabinet free 
and unhampered to carry out the policy which he 
broadly mapped out, and this, of course, applied 
especially to the two fighting branches, the War and 
Navy Departments. Mr. Wilson affected no knowl- 
edge of military affairs and made no pretense to 
being a master of strategy. He had none of that 
childish vanity attributed by a contemporary French- 
man to Thiers. Speaking once of a man raised to a 
high function, Thiers said: "He is no more suited 
for that ofiice than I am to be a druggist; and yet," 
he added, catching himself up, "I do know chemistry." 
Whatever knowledge Mr. Wilson had of chemistry 
he would not feel himself qualified to compound pre- 
scriptions ; he might have turned over the leaves of a 
work on tactics, but he was too humble and too con- 
scious of his own limitations to flatter himself that 
having looked on the cover of a book he knew its 
contents better than the author. 

Lincoln was well-nigh pestered to death by the crowds 
of applicants who thronged the offices and corridors 
of the White House, who interrupted him in his 
work and intercepted him in his walks to prefer their 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 257 

requests ; which Lincoln, always patient, always 
holding his sympathies unchecked, disposed of seriously 
or humorously as the case might be; as he did when 
he wrote to Stanton : "I personally wish Jacob Freese, 
of New Jersey, to be appointed colonel for a colored 
regiment, and this regardless of whether he can tell 
the exact shade of Julius Caesar's hair." Lincoln, 
too, largely was his own Chief of the Staff, trying to 
spur on the lagging McClellan and cautioning Burn- 
side not to break himself on Lee's stone wall, until 
he found Grant and Sherman and had confidence in 
them. And Lincoln, in his desire to do no man 
injustice, so scrupulous that he leaned backward, 
would not remove an incompetent general who was a 
Democrat, and more than once appointed men to high 
command to satisfy a political demand. 

The White House has been a place of quiet thought. 
It has been a place of consultation, but not a market 
place for political hucksters. No Governors of States 
have come post-haste to Washington to urge the 
appointment of this man to command a brigade be- 
cause of his services in the last election, or the obvious 
wisdom of giving that man a division because of the 
strength he could furnish the party in the next cam- 
paign. The politician has rarely seen the President ; 
if his business was legitimate he took it to the War 
Department, the Navy Department, the Treasury, 
wherever it belonged. Men seeking commissions, 
not as generals but in the lower ranks, earnest and 



258 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

patriotic men, willing to serve without recompense 
and to make their sacrifice, have been given their 
opportunity without having to bring political indorse- 
ment, for the system works without favoritism and 
the door has been throiMi open wide. 

Mr. Wilson has not dictated the operations of the 
field, he has left that to the men whose business it is ; 
but when questions of policy, as distinguished from 
technical detail, were to be decided he has acted ; 
and on one occasion at least he disregarded his pro- 
fessional advisers, who while not stoutly opposed were, 
for military reasons, reluctant to sanction the pro- 
posal. 

In the early summer of 1918 the American army 
then in France was not ready to take the field as a 
separate organization, although many of its units had 
been sufficiently trained to make them a powerful 
fighting force. The British and French armies were 
hard pressed, Germany apparently had launched the 
drive that was to carry her to Paris, the Channel ports 
and victory. The British and French Governments 
asked that the American troops be brigaded with 
their own to reinforce their depleted ranks. The War 
Department, working on a matured and compre- 
hensive program, w^as indisposed to accede to this 
request, believing that the American army fighting 
as an army under its own Commander-in-Chief and 
its divisional and corps commanders would, for psy- 
chological no less than military reasons, be more 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 259 

formidable and render greater service to the Allied 
cause if held intact instead of being split up, even if 
the assistance which the British and French so urgently 
needed were delayed. 

It was a question, it will be seen, that while in 
essence military was nevertheless one of judgment, 
vision and knowledge of American temperament. It 
was doubtless true that Americans would feel greater 
pride in being led by their own commanders and 
fighting as an independent army and retaining their 
own national identity than they would as auxiliaries 
merely to foreign armies ; every military man knows 
that a composite force is rarely as effective as an army 
of a single nationality ; in the case of American troops 
brigaded with the French there was the further draw- 
back of language and methods. These w^re con- 
siderations properly to have weight with the General 
Staff, who dare not make a mistake at the beginning, 
and a mistake then would have been a blow to American 
morale that might have been irreparable. Mr. Wilson 
weighed these considerations with his customary cau- 
tion and concluded that whatever might be gained by 
delay would be lost if delay enabled the Germans to 
go forward in their drive ; conceding that a certain 
risk had to be taken, it was a risk justified by the cir- 
cumstances ; it was not one of those gambles which even 
success would not condone, but a legitimate risk of war. 

A still greater test of statesmanship and the large 
vision, — and there is no real statesmanship without 



260 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

vision, — was the decision regarding the sending of 
AlHed troops to Siberia to support the Czeeho-Slovaks. 
Mr. Wilson was not required to decide a purely Amer- 
ican question, but he was sitting in an international 
council whose members were not entirely agreed as 
to their course of action, and again he held the casting 
vote. It is for the historian of the future to write 
this chapter ; all that can be said now is that Mr. Wilson 
was confronted with a situation of extreme complex- 
ity which required the most delicate management to 
avoid friction and arousing enmity and do harm to the 
common cause. He was required to compose and 
reconcile, to use persuasion and to remain firm ; to 
seek advice and to reject it ; to display tact and modera- 
tion. Mr. Wilson was again subjected to criticism, 
the delay in reaching a decision was not understood; 
once more he was accused of hesitating, of weighing 
too narrowly where a man of boldness and a steady 
mind would have been oppressed with no doubts ; 
but history, calmly reviewing all the facts, will say 
his policy was correct. 

Mr. Wilson saw the necessity of unified military 
command, which had been discussed by the Allied 
Governments but never progressed beyond the realm 
of discussion. Here again it was not so much a 
military question as one of sound judgment, and the 
position of the United States enabled it to cast the 
deciding vote. Had Mr. Wilson taken the narrow 
view, had he felt it humiliation to place an American 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 2G1 

Commander-in-Chief under the orders of a foreign 
GeneraHssimo, had he wanted to magnify the impor- 
tance of the United States, he would have offered 
cooperation but rejected subordination ; and one 
trembles to think what would have happened had 
Foch not been given supreme command. 



Mr. Wilson had brought the American people to 
sanction war because he had made the war to them a 
moral cause. "It is as startling as it is touching," 
he said in one of his earlier speeches, "to see how 
whenever you touch a principle you touch the hearts 
of the people of the United States. They listen to 
your debates of policy, they determine whicli party 
they prefer in power, they choose and prefer as ordinary 
men ; but their real afifection, their real force, their 
real irresistible momentum, is for the ideas which men 
embody." But although the country was at war Mr. 
Wilson's work was not completed. He had been the 
evangelist, he still must remain the exhorter and the 
preacher; suffering and sacrifice and sorrow were to 
be endured, and the people must be heartened by the 
knowledge that they were fighting not for themselves, 
but for the morality of the world ; when their spirit 
flagged they would be sustained and made strong again 
by the thought that theirs was no selfish purpose but 
they were giving themselves freely and with royal 
splendor to serve humanity. 



262 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

But it was not only the morality of to-day that made 
its appeal to Mr. Wilson, which he was able to make 
his own people share, but the morality of the long 
future ; and morality such as never before had entered 
into political calculations. The war in which the 
United States greatly against her will was forced to 
take part was to be the means, he hoped, to league 
peoples in friendship, to bring nations to deal more 
altruistically with one another, to unite men in a 
spiritual brotherhood, to reconcile the jealousies and 
soften the rivalries that kept the world excited and 
ever fearing war ; but above all, to establish covenants 
of justice that should be faithfully kept, and with 
liberality. Had the United States not entered the 
war it is highly probable, it is almost a certainty, 
that when the treaty of peace came to be written that 
combination of stupidity, selfishness and immorality 
known as European diplomacy would again come into 
its own and crown sacrifice and reward heroism with 
the mockery of a peace bought by trickery and bargain. 
It was the thing that Mr. Wilson declared should not 
be, that could not be, because the war had become a 
war of ideals and there could be no surrender of ideals. 

Addressing Congress on February 11, 1918, the 
President said: "The method the German Chan- 
cellor proposes is the method of the Congress of Vienna. 
We cannot and will not return to that. What is at 
stake now is the peace of the world. What we are 
striving for is a new international order based upon the 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 2G3 

broad and universal principles of right and justice, — 
no mere peace of shreds and patches. Is it possible 
that Count von Hertling does not see that, does not 
grasp it, is in fact living in his thoughts in a world 
dead and gone?" Mr. Wilson was living in a new 
world ; in a world of a new spirit. 

The speeches and state papers of Mr. Wilson since 
the American declaration of war form a remarkable 
series which have affected America no less than the 
rest of the world ; they have influenced Allied Govern- 
ments and peoples in the same way that they have the 
American people; because of their force, lucidity, 
high purpose and exposition of the aims of the Allies, 
which are the aims of an enlightened civilization, so 
cogently expressed, with such depth of feeling and 
sincerity, Mr. Wilson has become the spokesman of 
the nations at war with Germany. 

On April 15, 1917, the President appealed to the 
nation to put its whole strength into the war, "the 
grim and terrible war for democracy and human 
rights." At the dedication of the Red Cross building 
in Washington, on May 12, he said: "The heart of 
the country is in this war because it could not have gone 
into it if it had not first believed that here was an 
opportunity to express the character of the United 
States. We have gone in with no special grievance 
of our own, because we have always said that we were 
the friends and servants of mankind. We look for no 
profit. We look for no advantage. We will accept 



264 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

no advantage out of this war. We go because we 
believe that the very principles upon which the Ameri- 
can Republic was founded are now at stake and must 
be vindicated." In proclaiming the Draft Act, May 
18, the President said: "The day here named is the 
time upon which all shall present themselves for 
assignment to their tasks. It is for that reason des- 
tined to be remembered as one of the most conspicuous 
moments in our history. It is nothing less than the day 
upon which the manhood of the country shall step for- 
ward in one solid rank in defense of the ideals to which 
this nation is consecrated. It is important to those 
ideals no less than to the pride of this generation in mani- 
festing its devotion to them, that there be no gaps in 
the ranks. . . . The stern sacrifice that is before 
us urges that it be carried in all our hearts as a great 
day of patriotic devotion and obligation, when the 
duty shall lie upon every man, whether he is himself 
to be registered or not, to see to it that the name of 
every male person of the designated ages is written on 
these lists of honor." 

Mr. Roosevelt had been anxious to raise a volunteer 
division and be commissioned its commander. He had 
offered his services to the War Department, which 
had not been able to accept them. The Conscription 
Law gave the President permissive authority to raise 
volunteer regiments, outside the draft age limits, the 
purpose of Congress being to provide a command 
for Mr. Roosevelt. At the time of signing the bill 



THE \\\R PRESIDENT 265 

Mr. Wilson issued a statement in which he declared 
he would not raise volunteer regiments, that the 
responsibility for the successful conduct of the war 
rested upon him, antl he would not allow himself to 
be governed by political considerations. He said : "It 
would be very agreeable to me to pay Mr. Roosevelt 
this compliment and the Allies the compliment of 
sending to their aid one of our most distinguished 
public men, an ex-President, who has rendered many 
conspicuous public services and proved his gallantry 
in many striking w^ays. Politically, too, it would, no 
doubt, have a very fine effect and make a profound 
impression. 

"But this is not the time or the occasion for com- 
pliment or for any action not calculated to contribute 
to the immediate success of the war. The business 
now in hand is undramatic, practical and of scientific 
definiteness and precision. I shall act with regard to 
it at every step and in every particular under expert 
and professional advice from both sides of the 
water. . . . 

"The responsibility for the successful conduct of 
our own part in this great war rests upon me. I could 
not escape it if I would. I am too much interested in 
the cause we are fighting for to be interested in any- 
thing else but success. The issues involved are too 
immense for me to take into consideration anything 
whatever except the best, most effective, most imme- 
diate means of military action. ... I should be deeply 



266 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

to blame should I do otherwise, whatever the argument 
of policy, for a personal gratification or advantage." 

At Arlington Cemetery, on Memorial Day, May 30, 
Mr. Wilson said the opportunity had come for America 
to show the principles which she professed and by 
pouring out her blood and treasure to vindicate those 
principles. "There are times when words seem empty 
and only action seems great. Such a time has come, 
and in the providence of God America will once more 
have an opportunity to show to the world that she was 
born to serve mankind." 

Addressing the grizzled veterans of the Confederacy 
at their reunion in Washington on June 5, Mr. Wilson 
dwelt upon the mystery of God's purpose. "Many 
men, I know, particularly of your own generation, 
have wondered at some of the dealings of Providence, 
but the wise heart never questions the dealings of 
Providence, because the great long plan as it unfolds 
has a majesty about it and a definiteness of purpose, 
an elevation of ideal, which we were incapable of con- 
ceiving as we tried to work things out with our own 
short sight and weak strength. And now that we see 
ourselves a nation united, powerful, great in spirit 
and in purpose, we know the great ends which God 
in his mysterious Providence wrought through our 
instrumentality, because at the heart of the men of 
the North and of the South there was the same love 
of self-government and of liberty, and now we are to 
be an instrument in the hands of God to see that 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 2G7 

liberty is made secure for mankind. At the day of 
our greatest division there was one common passion 
among us, and that was the passion for human free- 
dom. We did not know that God was working out in 
his own way the method hy which we should best 
serve human freedom. . . . 

"We have prospered with a sort of heedless and 
irresponsible prosperity'. Now we are going to lay 
all our wealth, if necessary, and spend all our blood, 
if need be, to show that we were not accumulating 
that wealth selfishly, but were accumulating it for 
the service of mankind." 

At a Flag Day celebration in the shadow of the 
Washington Monument, on June 14, the President 
departed from his usual custom of speaking in general- 
ities and specifically indicted Germany. The United 
States, Mr. Wilson said, had been forced into war 
because the extraordinary insults and aggressions of 
Germany left no self-respecting choice but to take up 
arms in defense of the rights of a free people and of 
its honor as a sovereign government. Germany had 
sought to corrupt the American people, to spread sedi- 
tion among them, to incite Mexico to take up arms 
against America and to draw Japan into a hostile 
alliance. Telling how Germany had plotted and in- 
trigued to carry out her ambition of Mittcl Eiiropa, how 
in every country the forces of German corruption were 
at work, Mr. Wilson continued : 

"The great fact that stands out above all the rest is 



268 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

that this is a People's War, a war for freedom and jus- 
tice and self-government amongst all the nations of the 
world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who 
live upon it and have made it their own, the German 
peoples themselves included ; and that with us rests 
the choice to break through all these hypocrisies and 
patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set 
the world free. . . . 

"For us there is but one choice. We have made it. 
Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand 
in our way in this day of high resolution when every 
principle we hold dearest id to be vindicated and made 
secure for the salvation of the nations. We are 
ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall 
wear a new luster. Once more we shall make good 
with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which 
we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face 
of our people." 

In August the Pope addressed an appeal to the 
belligerents making certain suggestions as the basis 
for a just and durable peace. The President's reply, 
under date of August 27, and bearing the signature of 
Secretary Lansing, declared the Pope's proposals to 
be unacceptable because of the impossibility of rely- 
ing on the word of the German Government. The 
United States had suffered intolerable wrongs, yet it 
sought no material advantage of any kind ; it sought 
a peace based upon justice and fairness and the common 
rights of mankind, Mr. Wilson asserted. 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 2G!) 

In declining an invitation to address the American 
Alliance for Labor and Democracy at Minneapolis, 
the President, on September 2, wrote to Mr. Samuel 
Gompers, the President of the American Federation 
of Labor and the Chairman of the Alliance : "No one 
who is not blind can fail to see that the battle line of 
democracy for America stretches to-day from the 
fields of Flanders to every house and workshop where 
toiling, upward-striving men and women are counting 
the treasures of right and justice and liberty which are 
being threatened by our present enemies." 

Let us turn for a moment from these weighty matters 
to a letter couched in lighter vein. The President is 
an ardent lover of the theater ; it is his only form of 
relaxation, and from the beginning of his Adminis- 
tration Washington has seen him at the theater two 
and three times a week. He greatly liked a play, and 
he wrote to the star. Miss Carlisle — perhaps he has 
wT-itten other similar letters but this is the only one 
that has been given publicity: "I am going to take 
the liberty of telling you how much pleasure you and 
your associates gave Mrs. Wilson and me the other 
evening in the admirable presentation of ' The Country 
Cousin.' We particularly admired the simplicity, 
sincerity and dignity with which you played your own 
very interesting part. May I not congratulate you 
on doing admirably well a thing that was thoroughly 
worth doing? The play is delightful, and you played 
the chief part in making it so." 



270 ^YOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Space will permit only limited reference to other 
important state papers. In his Thanksgiving proc- 
lamation of November the President said: "We have 
been given the opportunity to serve mankind as we 
once served ourselves in the great day of our Declara- 
tion of Independence, by taking up arms against a 
tyranny that threatened to master and debase men 
everywhere and joining with other free peoples in 
demanding for all the nations of the world what we 
then demanded and obtained for ourselves." Address- 
ing the American Federation of Labor at Buffalo, on 
November 12, Mr. Wilson explained Germany's dream 
of Mittel Europa, declared "we must stand together 
night and day until this job is finished," and showed 
his scorn of the pacifists by saying: "What I am 
opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their 
stupidity. My heart is with them, but my mind has a 
contempt for them. I want peace, but I know how to 
get it, and they do not." 

In asking Congress on December 4 to declare war 
against Austria the President said: "Our present 
and immediate task is to w^in the war, and nothing 
shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. 
Every power and resource we possess, whether of men, 
or money or of materials, is being devoted and will 
continue to be devoted to that purpose until it is 
achieved"; but he reiterated what he had so often 
said before, that America was asking nothing for 
herself, attempting no injustice, crying for no venge- 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 271 

ance. "Justice and equality of rights can be had only 
at a great price. We are seeking permanent, not 
temporary, foundations for the peace of the world and 
must seek them candidly and fearlessly. As always, 
the right will prove to be the expedient." 

On January 8, 1918, in an Address before the two 
Houses of Congress, ]\Ir. "Wilson laid down the four- 
teen fundamental propositions on which peace should 
be concluded. "An evident principle," he asserted, 
"runs through the whole program I have outlined. 
It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationali- 
ties, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty 
and safety with one another, whether they be strong 
or weak. 

"Unless this principle be made its foundation no 
part of the structure of international justice can stand. 
The people of the United States could act upon no 
other principle ; and to the vindication of this principle 
they are ready to devote their lives, their honor and 
everything that they possess. The moral climax of 
this, the culminating and final war for human liberty, 
has come, and they are ready to put their own strength, 
their own highest purpose, their own integrity and 
devotion to the test." 

The German Chancellor and the Austrian Minister 
for Foreign Affairs having traversed INIr. Wilson's 
program for securing an enduring and just peace, 
Mr. Wilson on February 11 again addressed Congress, 
and after analyzing the rejoinders and stating anew 



272 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the principles which in the future must govern inter- 
national relations, concluded: "I have spoken thus 
only that the whole world may know the true spirit of 
America — that men everywhere may know that our 
passion for justice and self-government is no mere 
passion of words, but a passion which once set in 
action must be satisfied. The power of the United 
States is a menace to no nation or people. It will 
never be used in aggression or for the aggrandizement 
of any selfish interest of our own. It springs out of 
freedom and is for the service of freedom." 

Other notable Addresses of the year were delivered 
at Baltimore on April 6, in New York on May 18, at 
Mount Vernon on July 4 and again in New York on 
September 27. On every occasion Mr. Wilson aflBrmed 
the implacable purpose of the United States to use 
"force, force to the utmost, force without stint or 
limit" so as "to make the world safe for democracy." 

6 

^Vhat was the effect of Mr. Wilson's continual and 
continued iteration of the unselfishness of the United 
States and its use of force only to "make Right the 
law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down 
in the dust"? 

It had this effect: It made the war a Holy War. 
Mr. Wilson had called it a People's War, which it was ; 
but it was more than that. It was a war in which 
a nation had dedicated itself to righteousness. It 



THE WAR PRESIDENT 27^5 

offered everything and asked for nothing. The his- 
tory of the world offers no parallel. At the beginning 
it was frequently asked: "Why are we fighting.^" 
"What are we fighting for.?" The answer for states- 
men would have been: "You are fighting to defend 
yourselves against Germany ; German victory means 
that your turn will come next, and then it will be too 
late, because then you vnW be powerless"; which 
would have been the stimulus of fear ; or statesmen 
might have said : "You are fighting because Germany 
has committed insults and outrages, which you must 
submit to because you are weak or resent because you 
are strong and proud," which would have stimulated 
courage and implanted a desire for revenge ; and either 
would have been sufiicient to arouse patriotism and to 
inflame the latent primitive passion of a virile race to 
fight when in danger or in vindication of insult. 

Mr. Wilson made a richer appeal. To fight in 
defense of his own country is duty, to fight for a 
principle is altruism ; and altruism, if it be in the heart 
of a man, is a more sustaining thing than the cold 
response to the obligation of duty, fine as is duty well 
done. To send an army of millions three thousand 
miles across the seas for no gain, for no recompense 
in territory or indemnity, not even to cancel a debt 
of friendship long overdue, but to defend an abstract 
cause, was as Quixotic an adventure as the world had 
known ; so visionary that a practical people might well 
ask more substantial reward for their sacrifice. 



274 WOODROW WILSON : AN INTERPRETATION 

Yet this is what Mr. Wilson did. Again and again 
he said to his people that they were to cross the seas 
in their strength not as the avenger but as the pro- 
tector, not to profit but to spend, not to compete but 
to serve, not to conquer but to restore. Time after 
time he told them they should hope for nothing except 
sacrifice, they could expect nothing except suffering, 
their only consolation must be the approval of their 
own consciences ; that alone must be their guerdon. 
They were to lay down their lives for countries of 
which they had never heard, for nations for whom they 
never cared, for peoples who meant little to them, 
fighting about matters that touched them not at all ; 
and this they were to do so that peoples whose keepers 
they were not might enjoy the liberty that was theirs. 
They were to do battle under the banner of renuncia- 
tion, their oriflamme was to be the crusader's cross of 
humility and generosity. It was the maddest thing 
ever proposed by a serious statesman, a thing so mad 
that men believed the President in his visionary idealism 
was cooling enthusiasm and stifling a glorious fervor 
that needed only encouragement to glow like molten 
metal in the furnace of patriotism. 

Yet Mr. Wilson persisted. He preached his theme 
with variations, but it was always the same theme; 
always the leitmotif was disinterestedness, fealty to the 
right, the duty of America free to bring freedom to the 
oppressed and the enslaved. If it was idealism Mr. 
Wilson lifted men to his own exaltation. If at first he 



THE WAR riiESIDENT 275 

spoke over the heads of the multitude they grew in spir- 
itual stature and reached his own level, on their faces a 
new light shining. He quickened the spirit, he made 
men ask what was this morality of which he continually 
spoke ; he made men search their hearts and ask them- 
selves how true it was that America by her birthright of 
freedom held freedom in trust for the oppressed and 
was now under solemn pledge to redeem her trust. 
To the war-weary peoples of the Allied countries his 
words were an elixir. It brought to them not only 
new life but a new hope. They could not falter now, 
for the most powerful of all nations was marching her 
legions that mankind might be saved, willing to die that 
justice might live. 

These speeches of Mr. Wilson were attuned to a 
world-wide audience ; wherever there were men, there 
was his audience. He was never didactic, seldom 
argumentative ; he was homiletical, hortative, the 
preacher taking as his text the simple virtues, morality, 
justice, right ; assuming as of course his congregation 
believed in their canons and needed only to have 
them expounded for their faith to remain unshaken. 
He never ceased to appeal, and yet to his audience he 
seemed less to appeal than to point the way which men 
for their own salvation must travel. 

On the body of a young American soldier dead on 
the battlefield of France, a correspondent reports, 
was found a card with these words : "America stands 
for freedom and justice and is always ready to give the 



276 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

lives of her citizens that all the world may be freed from 
tyranny and live in peace and happiness." 

The words were printed by hand. They were un- 
dated and unsigned. Who wrote them no one will 
know. There on the battlefield of France they were 
the echo of the President's words. They were the 
effect of the President's preaching. They had made 
one man know his soul. They answered the question : 
*'Why is America fighting?" 



CHAPTER XII 

History and the Verdict 
1 

In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made 
to interpret Mr. Wilson as he has revealed himself 
through those things by which it is possible for the 
world to assess the character and motives of their 
governors — his speeches, writings and actions, which 
are the elements forming his policy ; and by his policy 
alone can a statesman be judged. Yet there are cer- 
tain aspects of his character which a man does not 
always reveal in what he says or writes ; sometimes 
he consciously tries to conceal them, sometimes he is 
not conscious of them, and this lacuna can be bridged 
by the observations of men who have been given the 
opportunity to form a correct judgment. Briefly, in 
conclusion, these sidelights will supplement the inter- 
pretation. 

In the gossip of Washington, — and gossip is not 
to be sneered at when it is taken for what it is worth ; 
not the veracities of history, but the lightly formed 
impressions of the events of the day, — more than 
once it has been said with fervor the country was 
indeed fortunate that Mr. Wilson was not "tcmper- 

277 



278 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

amental"; that in a time of crisis there sat in the 
White House a quiet, retiring, almost emotionless 
man, too impassive to be in danger of doing a hasty 
or ill-considered action, 

"Temperamental" is a vague and inexact term, but 
taking it at its current meaning, it perhaps better fits 
Mr. Wilson than any other word, which shows how 
popular opinion is formed and how easily it can be 
mistaken. He is a man of extreme temperament, but 
he has trained himself to self-control. He is naturally 
a reticent man, and reticence is a habit that grows. 
He is the antithesis of what is popularly known as a 
"good mixer." Some men there are with the good 
fortune to be at home in any company, who^ fit in 
easily in any circle. Mr. Wilson cannot, and never 
could. It is not only that he is shy, as has before 
been mentioned, which is a barrier to good fellow- 
ship, but he is naturally a serious man, — although 
he does not take himself too seriously, — which has 
made him somewhat impatient of the trivial ; but he 
knows how to relax and to balance the serious things 
of life with the light. He can laugh at a limerick and 
enjoy a vaudeville performance at the right time; 
and with him there is a time for all things. He is a 
meditative man. Habits once formed are not easily 
broken. He early formed the habit of thinking and 
studentship, and when he came to the White House he 
did not change. He might, had he cared for it, done 
as other Presidents, made the White House the social 



HISTORY AND THE VERDICT 279 

center, brought men and women about his tal)Ie, found 
rehixation in their companionship and as host, or a 
much sought after guest, taken all that hfc in that 
respect could give him. But Mr. Wilson, for the 
reasons already given, takes no enjoyment in what is 
conventionally known as "society." Not forming 
friendships readily, those chance acquaintanceships 
which some men so delight in do not appeal to him. 
The idle chatter of idle women, and of men, too, does 
not interest him. He is no recluse, but he finds no 
pleasure in eating many dishes at a crowded table, 
whether in his own home or that of another. To him 
it seems artificial, foolish, a waste of valuable time. 
His contentment is in the family circle. 

Mr. Wilson has not changed. The Princeton under- 
graduate was the President that was to be, but he has 
broadened, grown, developed with his years. He has 
grown fast in the last five years. Intellectually his 
stature is greater than when he entered the White 
House. He came to the W^hite House with a certain 
provincialism, a certain narrowness of view that was 
the price he paid for the life he led. There is nothing 
more dwarfing than community life, whether it be the 
community of the cloister, the college, or the barracks. 
Men become too self -centered, too immersed in their 
own specialty ; their eyes do not rise above their books 
or their breviaries ; in the seclusion of their detached 
calm they lose a certain contact with the world ; and 
men must be of the world, even if they cease to be 



280 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

worldly. There is always an irrepressible conflict 
between the business man and the academician ; the 
business man has a contempt for the professional 
mind because it is as unpractical as that of a child ; 
the professor scorns the highly developed practicality 
of the man of affairs. Mr. Wilson came to the White 
House with the prejudice of his class. 

All life is either growth or stagnation and decay. 
Some men reach their growth, whatever it may be, 
and stop, and the world is full of men who give prom- 
ise in their young manhood and never arrive ; other 
men never stop growing so long as life lasts. Mr. 
Wilson has not changed, because men do not change 
after they reach a certain age, especially when they are 
cast in a rigid mold and are of strong fiber, but his 
mental horizon has widened, his outlook on life is 
larger, his perception of things and men, of the mo- 
tives that animate men, of the things that are the con- 
flicting forces in life, is keener and yet softened ; more 
just, one would say, and also more generous. The 
responsibilities of his high office have not aged him or 
magnified in his own eyes his own importance ; but his 
sense of humor and his humility would save him 
from that. 

A man who has known him for twenty years, — and 
there are few men who can claim a friendship of twenty 
years' standing with Mr. Wilson, — says he finds him 
younger, more witty, more alert, but also more cer- 
tain of himself, with a greater grasp of affairs ; his 



HISTORY AND THE VERDICT 281 

mind, always quick, is now even quicker tlian in the 
past. And this man adds, curiously enough, that 
although he has known the President for twenty 
years he does not feel that he knows him. He baf- 
fles men. Yet another man, who has not known the 
President for twenty years but has been brought in 
very close contact with him during the last few years, 
declares that of all men Mr. Wilson is the least subtle. 
There is nothing subtle about him, but he is a straight 
thinker ; and straight thinking is so rare, this author- 
ity says, it mystifies. Most men, he adds, do not 
think ; the few who think have muddy thoughts. 
Mr. Wilson thinks straight and his thoughts are clear. 
He is not a superman, my authority goes on. En- 
dowed with a naturally good brain, he has developed 
it by reading and study and observation. His strength 
is his character. He has convictions. There are 
things about him one might wish could be changed; 
that would be different if he were the superman instead 
of being what he is, — the clay of common humanity. 
One might wish that he was not always quite so cer- 
tain of himself, that at times he would have doubts 
and fears ; that he might temper certitude with in- 
decision. One might wish that he was more accessible, 
that he would consult more freely, that he would lis- 
ten to suggestion, even if he rejected it. And one 
especially wishes that he were a better judge of char- 
acter and had that instinct, rare, but possessed by 
some men and a gift priceless to those in authority, 



282 WOODROW A\1LS0N: AN INTERPRETATION 

to judge men. The President is not a good judge of 
men. There are about him men who have done him 
great harm, but there is a certain stubbornness and 
defiance of opposition in the President's character 
that makes him stick to men and bhnds him to their 
faults, even though he knows they serve him badly 
and he must be the victim of their incompetence. 

Mr. Wilson has described himself as having a "one- 
track mind", but it might be more appropriately said 
that he has a "compartment mind.'* He has the 
faculty of concentration, of complete absorption in 
the thing in hand to the exclusion of all else'. His 
mind works in compartments. Figuratively he reaches 
out and opens a compartment in his brain as a system- 
atic man opens a drawer to get a paper, who has his 
papers so precisely arranged that he gets it without 
any lost motion, and then closes the drawer, indifferent 
to the rest of its contents, even forgetting them until 
the time again comes for their use. 

It is in the same way that Mr. Wilson's brain func- 
tions. He does one thing at a time, and until that 
thing is finished he is oblivious to the hundred other 
things each in their proper compartment and to be 
reached in their regular order. He does not scatter 
in his work, his thinking or his writing. He is sys- 
tematic, painstaking, exact. It is this faculty of 
concentration that enables him to work intensively 



HISTORY AND THE VERDICT 283 

and then to relax. Whoii I lie coiiipartnu'iits arc 
closed the labor of the day is over. 

Mr. Wilson's aloofness and isolation has been the 
topic of Washington discussion from almost the first 
day he entered the White House. Washington does 
not take kindly to a hermit President. The White 
House is the Mecca of the socially ambitious and the 
politically aspiring, and it was not in accord with 
tradition for its doors to be barred. The contrast 
was all the greater because of Mr. Wilson's imme- 
diate predecessors. Mr. Roosevelt had a naive curi- 
osity that could only be satisfied by coming in con- 
tact with the men he admired or who interested him ; 
there was seldom a meal at which he did not have a 
guest, rarely a day in which he did not receive some 
man distinguished or celebrated, American or foreign, 
— not merely in his official capacity as the President 
and to utter a few formal words of perfunctory welcome, 
but to talk as man to man and to discuss the par- 
ticular subject, poetry or pugilism, as the case might 
be, that made his visitor's fame. Mr. Taft was hos- 
pitality itself. He enjoyed having his friends about 
him ; he liked to forget' the cares of office in the com- 
panionship of his intimates, to listen to them and to 
add his own comment or criticism. 

The closed gates of the White House are symbolic. 
To Washington they symbolize the President. The 
^^^lite House seems a place of inscrutable mystery, a 
mystery as great as the President himself. What 



284 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

goes on behind its jealously guarded portals no one 
knows. Seldom does the President ask any one to 
break bread with him. The temple of Janus has been 
opened, but the White House has been more than 
ever impenetrably sealed. Foreign Missions have 
come to Washington and their members have been 
entertained at the White House; less the President 
could not do; but to no one else, outside of a very 
small circle, do the doors swing open. Even with the 
members of the Cabinet there is almost no social inter- 
course. They transact their business with him, they 
see him as necessity or occasion demands, but inti- 
macy does not exist. Mr. Wilson, after five years in the 
searchlight of a hundred million curious and inquisi- 
tive people, remains as remote, as unknown, as elu- 
sive a personality as if he belonged to another sphere. 
His few, his very few, intimates may know him, but 
his own people and the world at large do not. 

A certain analogy between the late Lord Salisbury 
and President Wilson in their common addiction to 
"blazing indiscretion" has already been noted; that 
analogy may be pursued a little further. Lord Salis- 
bury likewise courted privacy. When he was at the 
Foreign Office it was a grievance that no one was able 
to see him ; Ministers came from the four quarters of 
the earth expecting to talk to him at length, only to 
be told that they could put what they cared to say in 
writing. Most men place more importance on the 
spoken word than on the written. Most men prefer 



HISTORY AND THE VERDICT 285 

to deal with their associates face to face, and to regard 
a few minutes' conversation as more satisfactory than 
haters running to pages. Lord SaHsbury did not. Mr. 
Wilson does not. Officials have come to Washington 
anticipating the things they would tell the President, 
the questions he would naturally ask, the interest he 
would show. They have either not seen him at all or 
been dismissed briefly. They have departed wondering. 
In his noteworthy biography of Lincoln, Lord 
Charnwood has said that the members of Lincoln's 
Cabinet thought of the Administration as his Ad- 
ministration, and that one member told his friends 
that there was but one vote in the Cabinet, the Presi- 
dent's ; yet, Charnwood explains, Lincoln deferred 
to his Cabinet, recognizing when he wanted advice 
and when he did not, sometimes yielding to them, 
but taking grave steps without advice from them or 
any one else. What the members of Mr. Wilson's 
Cabinet think of him we shall know when their diaries 
and letters are published, — or rather our children 
will know, — but what little we know to-day leads us 
to believe that Mr. Wilson has profoundly impressed 
his Cabinet. It is proper, of course, that the members 
of a Cabinet should believe in their Chief (which all 
of Lincoln's Cabinet did not at all times, it may be 
added), but between the necessities of official loyalty 
and personal attachment is a wide gulf ; and it is all 
the more remarkable this strong admiration should 
exist in view of the coldly official relations between 



286 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

the President and his advisers. But his strength, his 
purpose and his sincerity have made their mark on 
them, and, nearer to him than the pubHc, they see in 
Mr. Wilson quahties of which the pubhc is unaware. 

It is unHkely that the future biographer will be 
able to say, as the biographer of Lincoln has, that 
Mr. Wilson deferred to his Cabinet or yielded to it. 
He has sometimes taken advice, but infrequently ; it 
is doubtful if he ever permitted his own judgment or 
his own conclusions to be swayed by the remonstrances 
or arguments of his Cabinet. The position of the 
American Cabinet is unlike that of the Cabinets of 
England or France, whose members, while subject to 
the control of the Prime Minister, and who in the end 
must either sustain his policy or surrender their port- 
folios, still feel they have the right to discuss and 
argue with him, to point out to him the weakness or 
the impolicy of his proposed course of action. Mem- 
bers of the American Cabinet do not argue with the 
President, although they may argue among them- 
selves. The President sits as a moderator, to hear 
the evidence presented, to compose the divergent 
views of its members, but not to have his own decision 
submitted to their judgment. The classic story of 
Grant and his Cabinet more than one President has 
told ; and doubtless more than one President has 
remembered it even if he did not tell it. 

On one occasion, according to the tradition. Grant 
found himself solidly opposed by his Cabinet. Cab- 



lUSTORY AND THE VERDICT 287 

inet questions are of course never voted on, hul on 
this occasion Grant polled the members. They all 
answered in the negative. "There are seven votes in 
the negative," Grant calmly announced, "and one, the 
President, in the affirmative. The affirmative has it." 

Yet Mr. Wilson, according to credible authority, 
will listen and be influenced when he is convinced that 
facts are submitted of which he was ignorant. It is 
well that the distinction should be clearly understood 
between policy and administration. Policy is convic- 
tion, the setting in motion of forces with the hope 
that certain consequences will ensue, although often 
in their dsedalian progress the results may be different 
from the hope anticipated. Administration is the 
execution of the policy, the shaping of the forces lib- 
erated by policy so as to make them effective. Re- 
solved on a certain line of policy, convinced that a 
certain thing must be done, as the individual must 
determine for himself his own conduct and abide the 
consequences, Mr. Wilson, solely responsible for pol- 
icy, could not share his responsibility with the mem- 
bers of his Cabinet or with anyone. A weak man, a 
man uncertain of himself, knowing he mistrusted 
himself, would look for support, would cling with des- 
peration to the fictitious strength given him by a 
dominating or persuasive member of his Cabinet, would 
yield and become stubborn, finally to act not as he 
purposed but as he had been swayed by the last or 
most ingenious appeal. 



288 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

Whatever other charge may be brought against 
Mr. Wilson, it cannot be truthfully charged that he 
has shirked his responsibility or tried to share it. 
He has never sought to shield himself behind his Cab- 
inet or the leaders of his party. He has demanded 
responsibility and accepted it. He has fought stub- 
bornly against having it diminished. Like the aero- 
plane and the submarine, the War Cabinet is a cre- 
ation of modern war. Lincoln did not have a War 
Cabinet any more than Pitt did ; but Lincoln had his 
War Committee of the Congress as Pitt had his Par- 
liament. In the early days of the war an attempt was 
made to saddle the President with a War Committee 
of Congress which should have power to supervise 
the conduct and expenditures of the war. Mr. Wilson 
at once made it known that if the pending bill reached 
him he would immediately veto it. Such a Com- 
mittee, he wrote to a member of his party in the 
House, would "render my task of conducting the 
war practically impossible." The constant super- 
vision of executive action "would amount to nothing 
less than assumption on the part of the legislative 
body of the executive work of the Administration." 
Recalling the War Committee of Lincoln's day, which 
"was the cause of constant and distressing harass- 
ment and rendered Mr. Lincoln's task all but impos- 
sible", the President pointedly observed, "The re- 
sponsibility rests upon the Administration." 

Here, once more, Mr. Wilson has stated with the 



HISTORY AND THE VERDICT 28!) 

utmost candor his view of tlie function of the pres- 
idential office. The task of conducting the war is 
his. It is not the task of the Cabinet, not even tliat 
of the Congress. The responsibihty rests upon the Ad- 
ministration, and the Administration is the President. 
The power of the President cannot be abridged any 
more than his duty can be divided. Tlie result is 
that to-day Mr. Wilson's power is greater than that 
of any other man. He is his own Prime ]\Iinister. 
He is his own War Cabinet. He is by the terms of 
the Constitution Commander-in-Chief of the Army 
and the Navy. And perhaps it would not be false to 
say that Mr. Wilson knows his power. 

Despite this great power centered in his hands there 
is abundant testimony that Mr. Wilson has not abused 
it and that he has not considered it beneath his dig- 
nity to seek advice on subjects outside of his own 
knowledge and to defer to the superior knowledge of 
men speaking with authority. Mr. Wilson makes no 
claim to being a master of finance, but without being 
either a theoretical or practical financier he could see 
the necessity of reforming the antiquated banking and 
currency system, and he drove Congress forward to 
the work. The broad plan was policy, the details 
were administration ; and Mr. Wilson had no false 
modesty in seeking expert advice and being guided 
by the men in whose integrity and knowledge he re- 
posed confidence. 



290 WOODROW WILSON: AN INTERPRETATION 

3 

Mr, Wilson, it was said in a previous chapter, once 
remarked to a friend, "I always try to keep my vision 
ahead of the facts, " and the man to whom he said it 
ofiFers this comment and explanation: "By a process 
cf elimination Mr. Wilson sees the bearing certain 
facts will have on a given situation and the efifect they 
will produce, and when the facts have produced their 
results he is prepared to meet them. That is ascrib- 
ing to him genius, at least an encompassing vision. It 
explains his aversion to seeing people and conferring 
with them, which has been accepted as an indication 
of both strength and weakness in a complex character 
— strength because of his self-reliance, weakness be- 
cause he is intolerant of opposition and wants every 
one to agree with him and does not like to be con- 
vinced that he is wrong ; but the truth is he does not 
want to have his vision clouded or his confidence 
in his own conclusions shaken. He knows that most 
men reach their conclusions on superficial judgment 
and without giving due weight to the facts ; he knows, 
moreover, that men are unconsciously influenced by 
what we call public opinion, and public opinion is 
usually valueless when exact knowledge is required ; 
and facts it too frequently scorns. Mr. Wilson keeps 
himself cloistered pondering the facts. There is some- 
thing almost uncanny in the man, in his seclusion, 
his ear deliberately closed to suggestion, sifting and 
sorting his facts, working on them as a mathematician 



HISTORY AX I) Tin: VERDICT 2!)1 

would the factors of an equation; l)alancin<,', rejecliii^', 
eliminating; building up combinations and destroying 
tliem ; until at last the answer works out, he i)roves 
it by his own applied rule, and is certain it is correct. 
It is one of the mysteries of the man, and I frankly 
confess that to me the man is a mystery." 

Does Mr. Wilson ever give a thought to these specu- 
lations of his fellow men ? One is inclined to think 
not, and his concern, if he have any, is that of Cicero's 
to Atticus : "Wliat would history be saying of me 
600 years hence? And that is a thing I fear much 
more than the petty gossip of those who are alive to- 
day." It is because he is willing to play for the ver- 
dict of history that Mr. Wilson thinks, in the words 
of one of his speeches, "It is service that dignifies, and 
service only"; that the kings of mankind are those 
who have won their own elevation to the throne "by 
thinking for their fellow men in terms of humanity 
and of unselfishness." 



